


We're not the kissing kind, are we?

by ysengrin



Series: ski fic [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Corporate, Angst and Feels, Love Triangles, M/M, Mixed Media, Mountains, Past Abuse, Past Relationship(s), Ramsay Bolton is His Own Warning, Skiing, Social Media, Winter Sports, they text a lot, weird amalgamations of book and show canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-30
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:48:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 43,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23331163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ysengrin/pseuds/ysengrin
Summary: When you go into business with people you’ve known since childhood, and when the three of you have a history with competitive sports, you don’t hook up with the one and then the other, and expect things to blow over.Theon should have known better.It’s a good thing, at least, that he’s over Robb – it’s a good thing that he’s not into Jon.The first time he stood on top of a slope, with his child-sized pair of skis and a grimace of apprehension, Ned had looked down at him and said, “Try to open your eyes before you hit a tree.” Some advice you never remember until it’s too late.
Relationships: Theon Greyjoy/Jon Snow, Theon Greyjoy/Robb Stark
Series: ski fic [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1817245
Comments: 193
Kudos: 184





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I was hesitant about reposting my explicit fics and eventually decided to centralise them somewhere new, so here we are! 
> 
> This story was originally posted between September 2017/March 2018. I'll have to reformat each chapter and I intend to proofread them as well, so this repost might take a while - I shall do my best, this fic has always been a monster, but it's my favourite monster by far.
> 
> The story originated from a series of prompts that @alittlestardustcaught had given me for a Theon/Robb fic, which included miscommunication, jealousy, CEO/office AU and "Don't you remember last night?" You'll find all those prompts in the fic, and then some (I don't know where the skiing came from). I still don't have an explanation for how this turned into what it is, namely a ridiculously long story, which isn't quite a Robb/Theon fic though it features a lot of Robb/Theon, and is quite possibly... unexpectedly... a Jon/Theon fic?

“Bullshit, all of it. You talk a good game, Greyjoy, but we both know that’s all it is: a clever game, and a lot of talking.”

“It’s always winter somewhere,” Theon shrugs easily. He leans across the table and his smile widens. “Look at it from a commercial standpoint. It’s Christmas all year round nowadays. The moment people see a glimpse of sunshine they start craving snow. Easiest ad campaign ever. We’d offer spots at a northern ski resort for a few lucky winners. Launch a home fragrance called _A Whiff of Winter_ , or something like that. Then we move on to the winter gear. There has to be a market for that in the south. You know, we’d make it controversial. ‘Climate conscious? Enjoy it while it lasts.’ With a picture of a guy skiing and something cute in the background. I don’t know, an arctic fox or whatever.” Theon makes a quick gesture in Ros’ direction and she steps forward with a coffee tray. Tyrion accepts a cup and raises his eyebrows at Theon when Theon waves the tray away.

“Headache,” Theon says.

“You look like it,” Tyrion notes. “That’s unusual. Are Stark and Snow working you to death?”

Theon shakes his head.

“Office party.”

This admission would be unprofessional if his interlocutor was anyone but Tyrion, who has a reputation for using the headquarters of Lannister, Inc., as a playground, and who even now is busy pouring the contents of a small flask into his coffee.

The dwarf laughs.

“A party? Do the Starks even know what the word means?”

“Robb does.”

“Ah, yes. Your young CEO. He looks the part, I’ll give him that. You could even argue in favour of that limp – it gives him a certain... allure. I’m guessing you won’t be putting him on that poster, I don’t suppose he still skis? Well, he remains a public figure. You’ll get traction with the gossip columns. What was the party for?”

“The one year anniversary of Stark & Snow."

Theon's practiced enough at this point that he can almost say the name without wincing. It’s his fault anyways: it’s not like Robb never offered to add his name to the other two.

_“Greyjoy, Stark & Snow, how does that sound?”_

_“Fucking terrible. We’re not a law firm.”_

“I had way too much ice wine,” he tells Tyrion.

“How brave of you to honour our meeting,” Tyrion says, with a hint of mirth in his mismatched eyes. “Where’s your boss then? Recovering somewhere?”

That’s a good question. Robb isn’t typically the kind of guy who would miss work to recover from a hangover, but then again, he’s not usually the kind of guy who’ll hog the karaoke stand and spend hours dancing with a girl he’d never noticed before. He hung around Jeyne until the party disbanded at around 4 am, in turns boisterous and oddly diffident. When Theon left, Robb had just thrown up on the girl’s shoes. Sweet Jeyne from Accounting, whom Theon never tried to flirt with because she was so quiet and unassuming it would have felt unnecessarily cruel, even for him.

“I’ve no idea where he is. But this was supposed to be a meeting to discuss our joint campaign in King’s Landing and you don’t need Robb for that. The PR rep should be enough.” He flips his pen between his fingers, pointing it towards his chest. “That’s me.”

Tyrion snorts.

“Even if I didn’t know that, I’d have guessed. You have the looks for it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Theon slides his phone along the table as he speaks, meaning to check if Robb has manifested himself.

“You have a very artificial smile,” Tyrion says, with far more seriousness than the question called for. “There’s a vacuum under these good looks, isn’t there? You’d murder someone and smile the guilt away.”

“Isn’t that a bit extreme?” Theon asks, scrolling down his messages. “I sell sportswear, not weapons of mass destruction, or cigarettes or god knows what.”

The message is from Robb’s half-brother Jon. Theon must have seen it and forgotten about it, much like he tends to forget about Jon himself, despite the fact that they work in the same company, and that Jon’s name is on every label they produce.

That first message is followed by another, sent minutes after the last.

Theon raises an unimpressed eyebrow and quickly types back,

“So are we agreed about March?” he asks Tyrion, who is busy sipping a coffee that smells strongly of rum.

“March! You must be joking. June at the earliest. A spread in _The Spider’s Web_ , preferably with Snow. And a few posters around town, to begin with.”

Theon’s screen darkens.

It flares back to life a few seconds later.

Theon types back with the fingers of one hand, even as he answers, “May. I’m being considerate.”

Tyrion scoffs. “Fine. But you Starks should consider branching out. Launch a collection of swimwear. Start designing yachts. Isn’t your family into ships? Greyjoys. You build ships, don’t you?”

“Not yachts,” Theon says. _Oil tankers._ “If it’s a boat you want, you’ll have to see with my sister. She’s the engineer.”

“Ah. She’s the brains you’re... what? The mouth? The teeth?”

“Something like that.”

It shouldn’t make him smile – after all, that’s just Jon being Jon, unimaginative and demanding, but there’s something amusing in the thought of Jon, long-faced, righteous Jon, taking time off what is undoubtedly very important, very boring work, to hurl a few insults his way.

He looks up and catches a glimpse of a bearded, bleary-eyed face through the glass door behind Tyrion.

“As much as I enjoy the coffee and the company – and I’ll leave it up to you to guess which one was tasteful and which one was tasteless... I have a plane to catch,” Tyrion says, rising from his chair.

Behind the window, Robb has disappeared. So Theon whisks together a few papers for Tyrion to sign, and once that's done, he walks the dwarf to the entrance of the building.

"Mr Lannister, always a pleasure."

"You know it never is. Not for you, not for me. Give my greetings to the family - what's left of it."

And with that he's out the door, leaving Theon with his soured smile and a good deal of unspent anger. Though it's possible that the anger isn't directed at Tyrion at all – in fact the meeting went well, especially if one compares it to the various run-ins he's had with Tyrion in the past. The dwarf has a tendency to be unerringly perceptive, which, added to his vicious sense of humour, has never done much to commend him to Theon. He's learned early on to conceal his frustrations with a mocking smile, and Tyrion knows how to rip that façade to pieces with a well-chosen quip. Theon is vaguely aware that they're more alike than they would like, the both of them frustrated with their lot in life and willing to take it out on the world. But the one does it under cover of lies and the other with a ruthless wielding of the naked truth. He knows for a fact that they'll never get along, which makes this the most civil encounter they've ever had, and most likely ever will have.

Theon rolls his eyes. He’d had many ideas as to how the past six to eight hours would go, and none of them involved sitting down with Tyrion Lannister to discuss business while texting Robb's utter bore of a half-brother.

He shoves the phone back in his pocket. Being angry at Jon is easy, like smiling at people he hates, like sliding into cold water and beginning to swim. Second nature, as it happens.

Being angry at Robb, however – that's another matter.

"He's not in," Mya tells him, placing her palm against the phone in her hand.

"What do you mean, he's not in? I can see him," Theon says with raised eyebrows. The glass wall behind Mya's desk offers a good view of Robb's office, and he can see Robb lying on the leather couch that Sansa got for him a few months back, insisting it would make him look "more mature". Robb doesn't look particularly mature at present, with sunglasses on at midday and his tie hanging loose.

"He said not to disturb him, and that he wasn't here for anyone. I assumed that meant you as well."

There was a time when Mya laughed along at his jokes, and when she would go down on her knees in the copy room for him, on the condition that he didn't mess up her perfect blond bun. But that was then and this is now, and now, for a number of reasons that begin and end with his carelessness, Mya dislikes him with a passion.

"I'm not anyone, though, am I?" Theon says, as he leans sideways across her desk, trying to get Robb's attention. Robb, however, is still very much engaged in what could be a deep reflexion or a nap. It's hard to tell with the sunglasses.

"You're a nuisance, that's what you are," Mya tells him. "No! I didn't mean you, sir," she hastens to say, clutching her phone. "I wouldn't presume... I am deeply sorry... One of my colleagues was pestering me and I..."

"Colleague?" Theon mouths, even as he walks around her and goes to open the door of Robb's office. He stops on the threshold, letting the door slam shut behind him as he calls out, "Rise and shine, asshole. Snow had to receive that sleaze Baelish this morning for what was supposed to be an interview of the both of you, and I had to deal with the Lannisters, when you know perfectly well they can't stand me."

Robb grunts. One of his arms is hanging off the couch, and he paints a picture of dejection, with his open collar and his scrunched up brows and his fingers brushing the floor.

"Aren't you pathetic," Theon snorts. He comes closer, nudging Robb's hand with the tip of a leather shoe. "What's the matter? She wouldn't come home with you?"

"I was nervous," Robb says. "I drank far too much." His hand twitches against Theon's shoe. "We didn't... I couldn't... It was a fucking disaster."

"You couldn't?" Theon repeats, nasty and perhaps a tad bit gleeful, though he makes sure to sound more clueless than he actually is. "You couldn't what?"

"Perform," Robb says, through gritted teeth.

"Oh, Robb." He pats his knee in mock comfort. "It happens. I mean, it never happened to me, but I imagine it must be a traumatising experience."

"Don't be a dick," Robb grumbles. "You had a great night. I saw you making out with that girl from HR. The one... the one with the face."

"Yes, Robb, the one with the face. I'm not sure what I'd have made out with if she didn't have one."

"Oh, you know what I mean." Robb manages to rise into a sitting position, leaning heavily against the armrest. "The one with the cute smile and the crooked front teeth. And that was when I got there... You must have spent, what, two hours comforting Roslin, after her fight with Edmure? And when I left you were cozying up to Ros. So fine, you had a good night. Seems harsh that you'd make fun of mine."

"I'm surprised you noticed so much," Theon says. "Given that you spent the night completely hypnotised by the little accounting girl."

Robb shifts uneasily against the couch.

"She was kind and she wanted me," he says.

"Did you want her, though?"

As the silence lengthens and Theon's knowing look becomes too oppressive, Robb takes it upon himself to change the subject.

"I'd prepared both meetings, so you wouldn't be caught off-guard. I sent Jon my answers for the interview last week. As for you... I figured you'd do just fine. You've always been better than me at spinning bullshit."

"What a compliment."

"If you're going to be the human equivalent of nails on a chalkboard, maybe you should just leave," Robb groans, flopping back down on the couch.

"Whatever your majesty wants," Theon says, with a hollow smile. "You know where to find me. And you might want to call your business partner. Let him know you’re alive."

He nearly slams the door on his way out as well, but something holds him back – not so much a fear of the consequences as a sudden urge to keep this dispute as private as possible, despite the glass partitions, despite his angry sneer. And there’s the sight of the cane, too, propped against a coffee table. Robb had been quick to tell Theon he didn’t want to be treated like glass after the accident – had been the one who’d taken to trade the adrenaline of competitive sports for a wholly different kind of physical exertion. _Harder – come on! Are you afraid you’ll break me?_

A year and a lifetime away.

Theon whips his phone out, intending to check his schedule. Find himself something to do. Instead, his eye catches on his on-going conversation with Jon, and he stills in his tracks.

“You have that look on your face,” Mya calls out nonchalantly from her desk. She’s put down the phone and is busy painting her nails a deep, blood-red colour.

“What?” Theon says, a little thrown.

“Like you’ve found a new girl to fuck and fuck over.”

“Well, actually, maybe I have”, he mutters.


	2. Chapter 2

At least, if Robb had gotten injured during a competition, there'd have been something... noble, maybe, about it. Or perhaps it'd just have been a whole other can of worms, the video of the event replaying itself ad nauseam online with maybe a tragic shot of Sansa and Arya’s dual expressions of shock behind the barriers.

But it didn't happen during a competition, and Theon knows that it haunts Robb, the stupidity of it – the Freys’ badly-tended, artificial slope, on a day when he could have been doing a variety of other things.

Of course it haunts Jon, too, who'd been busy winning some cross-country competition up north. And it haunts Theon – will go on haunting him for fucking forever, that call from Robb that he didn't take, so that when he finally showed up at the hospital, twelve hours after the fact, Robb had had to endure most of the ordeal on his own. They'd already removed the huge splinter from his leg and he was sleeping, whiter than the sheets of the narrow hospital bed, his eyelids a tired purplish-blue under the buzzing neon lights.

With that his career was over, and for a time Theon worried that Robb wouldn't recover, that maybe he'd manage to walk again, but that it wouldn't be enough. At which point Jon came down with the idea of the sportswear business – and, somehow, it had worked. Robb put an end to his wallowing. He put an end to the drinking, the partying, the hobbling in and out of bars, the clumsy fistfights, the throwing up at the back of taxis. And he put an end to the fucking, too. As if he’d discarded the sex alongside his cable-knit sweaters and his jeans. The new Robb wore bespoke suits, and Theon circled him like a weary animal, searching for a flaw, the proverbial chink in the armour. After a while, he stopped looking.

Robb’s sister is about the last person he expects to see when he walks into the break room. He won’t complain, though. They get along fine, and Sansa’s always a sight for sore eyes, with her clear eyes and her hair the colour of autumn leaves.

“You’re a sick bastard, you know that, right?” she says. “And I don’t mean it as a compliment.”

“That sounds a little gratuitous, but okay,” Theon smiles.

“I’ve been on the phone with Roslin,” she tells him, taking a bite of her apple.

Theon stops pretending that he’s trying to figure out how the coffee machine works. “Roslin,” he repeats, relieved that he doesn’t have to feign innocence. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“She went on and on about how nice you were to her last night. How Edmure was an idiot, but at least there’d been a decent guy at the party.”

Theon laughs.

“Yes, my thoughts exactly,” Sansa scowls. “Obviously, she doesn’t know you very well. How about you keep your distances, and we make sure she doesn’t have to be disappointed?”

“What are you even doing here? Don’t you have your own business to run?” He comes to sit at her table and pries the apple from her fingers, stealing a bite. “The Lannister boy giving you hell again?”

“No. I’ve refused to deal with him,” Sansa says coolly, snatching back her apple. “When we have an order from the Lannisters, I let Margaery handle Joffrey. And to answer your other question, yes, I do have a business to run. But I heard you had an interview with Petyr. You know you’re supposed to consult me before you talk to him.”

“Tell that to Jon. He’s the one who received the creep.”

A childhood friend of Robb and Sansa’s mother, Petyr Baelish had recently bought a magazine, and though the thing deals mainly in scandals, it’s a fact that it sells well. They’d managed to get a few interviews out of him by using his rather disturbing infatuation with Sansa.

“Jon,” Sansa repeats, blue eyes wide. “You didn’t let him go alone, did you? He hates Petyr and he doesn’t have a clue how to hide it.”

“Well, we’re in for a treat with that interview, then, aren’t we?” Theon gets up easily, patting her on the head as he goes by. “Don’t worry. The public loves Jon, it goes along with being pretty. You should know.”

In the corridor, he checks his phone for an answer from Jon, and finds there isn’t one, though Jon has undoubtedly read his messages.

He pictures Jon frowning at his phone, the downward curl of his lips. Jon’s mouth is possibly his most attractive feature, and Theon resents himself for thinking about it now, when it seems likely that he won’t get to defile it.

 _Knew it_ , he thinks, and then, more vehemently, _chickenshit._

When they’d created the company, Robb and Jon had been adamant that all their products would be Northern-made. After a month or two, Theon had obtained that they at least hire an independent team of designers. It had proven difficult to find a decent graphic designer up north, let alone a whole team, and they couldn't really import one from the south – what would their selling- point be? "Occasionally the sun comes out, and if you're lucky you'll see a real wolf? The pay is good but sometimes the heating isn't?"

So they'd hired a southern-based duo, and once a week Theon endures the hour-long video call that he unwittingly signed-up for with this outsourcing plan.

“It’s not a gender thing,” he assures them, feeling the headache build up again. It’s a soreness around the eyes, a pounding against his temples.

“If you say you don’t think men will want to buy these skis because there’s flowers on them, I’m sorry but it kind of is,” Renly remarks pointedly.

“That’s not what I said.” Theon’s been forcing himself to smile for the past five minutes; he thinks he might pull a muscle. “I’m sure there’ll be guys wanting to buy these skis. I’m just saying that among fifteen models, you could have made at least three or four without any flowers on them.”

“You’re the one who said you wanted consistency this season,” Loras chimes in.

He comes to sit beside Renly at the table. With his billowing white shirt and his light-brown curls, he might have escaped from the cover of a romance novel. Renly, meanwhile, is the embodiment of every preconception Theon’s ever had about young artists from the capital: he wears black-rimmed glasses and his beard is a work of art.

“Consistency doesn’t exclude diversity,” Theon says. “And don’t say that you picked different types of flowers,” he adds quickly, forestalling Renly’s protest. “Give me at least one pair with something more neutral – a geometrical pattern...”

“If we’re aiming at consistency, we should keep the natural theme,” Loras points out.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. Snowflakes, then. Stylized snowflakes on a black background: Stark & Snow. Make it a manifesto of the brand.”

“Snowflakes,” Renly laments. “On skis. God, could you be more dull?”

Theon can see his own face in the bottom corner of the screen. The smile is long gone, replaced by a clenched jaw and a furrowed brow. Time to bring the meeting to an end.

“You have a week. Or I’m going to Tormund instead.”

“Tormund!” Renly chokes. “You can’t be serious. I’ve seen the gear he made for Snow last year. No one with a modicum of taste would be caught dead wearing that mess.”

“A week,” Theon repeats, though he’s inclined to agree. Tormund’s propensity to splatter his collections with the stylized bones of bears and crows has never made much sense to him, nor does Jon’s friendship with Tormund, since the Northerner is loud where Jon is quiet, ruthless where Jon is cautious.

Renly gives a stiff nod that Theon readily accepts as an olive branch.

“We’ll be in touch,” Loras says.

 _I should hope so_ , Theon thinks, but he merely smiles, and waits until he’s terminated the call to heave a sigh. Suddenly, the room is blessedly silent, save for the distant chirping of birds and the sounds of the road below, drifting in through the open window.

Theon lets his head fall against the palm of his hand. A nap, just a half hour, an hour maybe. He thinks with sudden longing of Robb’s couch. He’d probably have to issue some grovelling apology to get access to it. A few months ago, the apology would have required him to stay after hours, and it’s a testament to how unsatisfying the previous night has been that this brief memory almost makes his mouth water (Robb’s unexpected cry, the surprise in his eyes as Theon looked up and caught a glimpse of his face in the yellow beam of light from a streetlamp; the bright eyes and vacant grin of the truly well-fucked).

He wills himself to think about anything else – flowery skis and promotional leaflets and Roslin Tully leaning against his shoulder with a graceful little sigh. Any distraction will do, really. So he pulls out his phone, the gesture almost a habit by now. As if this conversation with Jon had been going on for years, rather than an hour or two.

“Fucking hell.”

He closes and reopens the conversation, scrolls back up to make sure that his phone didn’t somehow get Jon confused with someone else. But it’s Jon’s number, and Jon’s picture, where he looks as if he’s just run a hand through his dark curls, and his smile is slightly embarrassed, like he expects you to make fun of him.

“ _What_ did you drink last night,” Theon murmurs, awestruck in spite of himself. He couldn’t tell if the comment is directed at Jon, or at himself, for the way he rushes to reply without quite giving himself time to reconsider.

In the end, he does get a fifteen-minute break, in between a phone call with the Winter Northern, the national federation of winter sports, and the weekly debrief that Robb and Jon have made mandatory for most of the employees of Stark & Snow.

He could have used the time to lie down for a minute and sleep through the rest of his hangover, but instead he goes and locks himself in the small bathroom down the hall from his office.

He means to jerk off to Jon's messages – because they might be tame as far as sexting goes, and he's got a few conversations saved with girls who are far better at this than Jon, but it should be enough anyways. The simple thought of Jon with his dark woollen sweaters and his cautious smiles slapping a belt against his bare ass should be enough.

But it isn’t, nothing is ever that simple, so that if it's Jon's taunts that get him hard, he comes with Robb's name stuck at the back of his throat, his head full of memories that he'd promised himself he’d never use as wank material.

Ridiculously enough, it's not even the cruder ones that push him over the edge (god knows he's got a few of these, of licking Robb's spunk-covered fingers in the bathroom of a seedy bar, of leaving bite marks on Robb's ass that took weeks to fade out). No, it's that one memory of the first time they went out after the accident, and how Robb had pulled him close with a hand fisted in the collar of his t-shirt to shout in his ear, above the surrounding din, “Fuck! I want you to fuck me!”

Afterwards, he makes the mistake of looking up as he washes his hands, and he barely recognizes the guy in the mirror. There’s a wounded look to him, like he’s been bullied into a corner and is searching in worried silence for a way out. He tries to smile, but it only makes it worse. No one’s ever had to say that Theon Greyjoy was “putting on a brave face”, and yet that’s exactly how he’d describe his reflection.

 _And all this because of a stupid party,_ he thinks, balling up his handful of paper towels. _If I’d just looked the other way..._

But he never would have, and he knows it. The drunker Robb gets, the more irresistible, with his million-watt smile and his tendency to promise you the world.

Theon shows up late at the meeting, later even than Pyp and Grenn, the IT guys, who can usually be depended upon to take a cigarette break five minutes after the debrief has already started.

Jon is talking about the new ski designs as Mya projects pictures of flowery skis on the screen. Theon makes a point of looking right at Jon as he comes in, and Jon looks back, seemingly unperturbed. As Theon drags back a chair, making his closest neighbours jump and then shoot him irritated glares, he fantasizes about walking to where Jon is sitting on the table. He’d kiss him full on the mouth in front of the entire office, hands buried in ink-black hair. Jon wouldn’t be so stern, then. The rhythm of his breathing would betray him, as would his slick lips and his haggard eyes.

Beside Jon, Robb seems to have recovered somewhat. The glasses are gone at any rate, and he’s doing a pretty good job of hiding his exhaustion. His soft, dreamy-eyed look could almost pass for thoughtfulness. He’s lounging in his chair – probably because it allows him to extend his leg under the table. Theon spots the cane at the back, propped up against a shelf. Sometimes, Robb forgets about it. He’ll get up with the spontaneous spring of a man used to a greater fluidity of movement, to a perfect control of his limbs. Theon knows better than to step forward when the reality of the injury catches up with Robb. He tried once, and Robb punched him for it.

“... and we’ve secured an early start for the southern campaign,” Jon says. “Thank you, Theon. We’ll finish with the accounts. Jeyne brought in the figures for the past month...”

Jon glances at his phone on the table and frowns, but he goes on speaking until the end of his presentation, after which the lady from HR takes over (“We’ve recruited a new assistant for Jon”; “During the party, someone left with the giant fern from the reception area, and we would like it back”). Jon retreats to an actual chair and Theon begins a game of Sudoku with his closest neighbour, Gilly from Marketing. By the time he picks up his phone, his lock screen is full.

_I am paying attention,_ he writes back to Robb. _Skis, ferns, Lannisters, skis, skis. See?_ He looks up and meets Robb’s gaze. Robb rolls his eyes. Theon smirks and returns to his phone, waving away the quiz on “Health Risks In The Workplace” that his right-hand neighbour attempts to pass on to him.

Robb frowns, an electric storm gathering under his dark brows. Theon fancies he can feel the static all the way across the conference table, raising the hair on his arms.

"You all look like zombies," Gilly whispers, as she rubs the eraser of her pencil across a column that doesn't add up. "How long did the party last?"

"A while," Theon says, distractedly, and then, by force of habit, “Why didn’t you come? I missed you.” He flashes her a smile.

It’s a mistake and he knows it – Gilly arrived in the office at the same time as Jon’s buddy Sam, and maybe an hour or two after they walked in, Jon had pulled Theon aside and let him know in no uncertain terms that he’d be in for a world of trouble if he made a move on the girl.

Theon had half a mind to disobey just for the sake of it, but he wasn’t on good enough terms with Robb at the time to risk pissing off Jon as well. They put Sam in charge of the books, along with Jeyne and some other guy whose name Theon still doesn’t know, a sad looking fellow that he’ll bump into now and again in the break room. Theon doesn’t quite get how Sam could have found time for a girlfriend. Judging from the contents of his conversation, he’s half-married to his job and half-married to Jon, or at least, to the cult of Jon’s many perfections. But to be fair, Theon hasn’t had many occasions to talk to him. Sam is soft and chirpy and exhaustingly literate, and Theon has made a habit of fleeing to the patio at lunchtime in order to avoid another hour-long dissertation on the history of sledges.

They seem happy together though, Gilly and Sam. Happy enough that if he were to step between them, any number of people would have his head on a spike. Jon and Sansa, probably Mya if she got wind of it, which she probably would.

Gilly blushes. “I was a little tired,” she says. “It was really nice of you to give me the day off.”

Theon raises his eyebrows, puzzled, but then he catches a glimpse of Jon, who is listening to the on-going talk about health risks with an expression of rapt attention. It sounds much like Jon, to give time off to Theon’s subordinates, and it’s unlikely Theon will ever know if Jon did it out of the goodness of his heart, to repay the girl’s hard work, or if he simply wanted to antagonise him. Maybe it’s a bit of both.

“I’m glad you’re feeling better,” Theon says, and leans forward, pretending to look at the wrinkled piece of paper between them. A strand of Gilly’s blond hair brushes his cheek. “I think it should be a four, here. Then if you put one here, you’d get fours in all three columns, see?”

“Oh, you’re right!” Gilly eagerly bends over the page to scribble the numbers. Theon gets a whiff of a sweet, artificial smell, cherry or strawberry or something of the sort. Suddenly he sees the scene for what it is – not a man making a move on a woman, but two children playing games in the back of a classroom, neither of them very interested in the lesson at hand.

“Is there a crosswords on the other side?” he asks, hopeful. Gilly flips the paper over with a triumphant grin.

“Thank god for free dailies,” Theon mutters.


	3. Chapter 3

Theon snags a cigarette from Grenn and spends his ten minutes on the patio, wondering whether or not he should go. He's not used to doing what he's told, least of all when it's Jon giving the orders.

"They were out of it, right?" Grenn says.

"Hm?" Theon answers, taking a long drag as he goes through his email. "Who, what?"

"Stark and Snow," Pyp says. "They were both on their phones during the debrief."

"What was this fern stuff about, though?" Grenn wonders, looking back at the double doors leading to the reception area, where the missing fern once stood.

"I'm sure it was Mya," Pyp says. "You know she just moved into a new place. She probably wanted some greenery."

"How did it go with Roslin?" Grenn asks Theon. "Half of the office has a bet running on this. Did you go home together or...?"

Theon considers what a lie might cost him, and shakes his head a subtle no.

"I told you!" Pyp exclaims. "She just needed a shoulder to cry on."

"And you wish she'd picked yours, right?" Grenn says. "In any case, she's married."

"We know you don't have any boundaries," Pyp tells Theon. "But some of us value our lives, y'know?"

"I do value my life," Theon smiles.  
  
It’s not exactly a lie. But it’s not exactly the truth, either.  
  
He puts out his cigarette. "I have someplace to be. Gentlemen, I'll see you later."  
  
"Here," Pyp says, throwing something his way.

Theon catches it easily, despite the awkward throw – remnants of a not-so-distant past, when he could tell the exact trajectory of a moving object at a distance of hundreds of feet. He looks down at the box of mints. The grin steals over his mouth like a shadow, there one second and gone the next.

"I don’t know who she is, but she doesn’t deserve your nicotine breath," Pyp says.

Contrary to Robb’s office, which was designed as a glass-box on the upper floor of their building, Jon’s office is on the lower floor, and though one of the walls is made of glass, it disappears like the rest of the room behind a clutter of gear and whiteboards and rolled-up plans and posters. Theon suspects the disorder is intentional. Jon can be gone for weeks at a time, training for competitions and then flying to wherever the competitions take place. The mess is a way for him to remind them that he’s still part of the firm.

He’d offered to slow down at first, right after they created Stark & Snow. Not so much because they needed him at the office – business took a while to take off – but rather because he’d tried, in his own way, to spare Robb’s feelings. If Robb couldn’t ski, then Jon wouldn’t ski, no matter how pointless that may be. Eventually, Robb pointed out that they needed the visibility – the sponsors, the money, the press. And so Jon returned to the world of mountaintops and slopes that had been Robb’s, too, once upon a foregone time.

In his absence, things have a tendency to pile up in his office, and whenever he returns, he’s mostly content with picking them up and setting them down in a different corner. It’s presents from his sponsors and bags full of clothes, the schematics that he does in his spare time and the prototypes that are created using the schematics. For all that Theon knows, one might even find the fucking fern in there somewhere, lying crushed under a pile of books.

Theon goes to knock on the door and freezes, staring at his hand. What the fuck has come over him, that he’d start to be polite with Jon? In the past fifteen years or so, he’s mostly ever called him by his last name, often with a mocking smile to boot. A way of saying, _I know it hurts you not to be a Stark, and I’ll keep twisting the knife just for the briefest flash of anger across your pretty face._

He comes in five minutes late. He doesn’t knock.

Jon is sitting at his desk, head bent over a notepad and with Renly and Loras’ designs beside him, along with what looks like Sam and Jeyne’s graphs of the firms’ earnings. Theon steps over a box and leans down to peer into another (ski boots, a stack of flyers with Jon’s face on them – looking into the distance, fashionably bearded and brooding against a backdrop of icy summits). He sidesteps a crate of beer – Blackforge Brewery, a present from Robb and Jon’s younger sister Arya. She'd gone into business with a friend around the time they created Stark & Snow. Every so often the office will receive a couple of crates: one to share, and one specifically for Jon, because he’s Arya’s favourite.

On the wall behind Jon, there’s a picture of him scaling a wall of ice, probably the north face of Castle Black.

“Anyone ever told you you were crazy, Snow?” Theon asks. Jon swivels in his seat and follows his gaze upwards towards the picture.  
  
“I had help. I had a good team.”  
  
“Then you were all crazy,” Theon snorts. “This entire face is black ice.”

“We were going to climb Castle Black, but there were already five or six teams in the area. So we went west. That’s the north face of the Greyguard.”

“Like that means anything to me,” Theon mutters, though it’s something of a lie. He grew up in the North, after all. He’s learned the names of these mountains, Castle Black with its black spurs and the tall spire of the Icemark, the crouching beast of Hoarfrost Hill and the lonely Shadow Tower, with its reputation for being un-climbable.

“When you get to the top, you get a sense of what it means to be alive,” Jon says. “Not for long, because it’s fucking freezing, but it makes the whole ordeal worthwhile.”

“There are easier ways to get that kind of rush.”

“For us it’s one of two things, though. Robb, you and me. That kind of physical challenge – or sex.”

“You’re the only one who gets a choice in the matter.” Theon pushes up his sleeve, showing Jon the delicate pattern of scars across his palm and wrist, some of them reaching as far up as his elbow. “I’m not about to risk my motor skills for a chance at firing another arrow.”

Jon watches him carefully for a moment – it’s easy to guess why. This isn’t something Theon usually talks about, and so no one ever broaches the subject, out of respect or out of fear. Then Jon makes up his mind and pulls his chair forward to get a better look. Theon nearly reconsiders, but something in Jon’s expression holds him in place. He might have expected pity, or horror (and he thinks of his sister’s face when she visited him the night after the bar fight, once he’d told her how deep the broken shard had gone). But Jon looks angry, his mouth set in a hard line and his dark eyes wide.

“Did you, then?” he asks, and when Theon just raises his eyebrows, he elaborates, “Did you really do it to yourself?"

"No," Theon says. The ease with which the word has left his lips surprises him, though perhaps it's just part and parcel of his usual recklessness. Giving Jon, whom he's never liked, the one secret that might be used against him – that might make him open and vulnerable and weak. "I had such a bad rep I knew they'd believe Ramsay if I started saying he’d attacked me. It was easier to let people think I'd fallen on the damn bottle." He pulls down his sleeve. It's not something he thinks about much anymore, that mad month of the Bolton sponsorship. Water under the bridges – or rather, maybe, Ramsay Bolton strutting across said bridges on his way to glory, winning prizes that had once been Theon's to take, while Theon himself remains somewhere down under, barely managing to keep himself afloat.

The phone on Jon's desk begins to ring. Theon jumps, but Jon barely moves a muscle. He doesn't reach for the phone.

"This is not how I thought this would go," Jon says, with characteristic candour.

"How did you think it would go?"

"I thought I'd boss you around for once. I was looking forward to it."

Theon looks down at him, sitting with his chin tilted up and his long legs open wide. Jon's always been of a proud sort, and it's something of a relief to finally be able to admit that this conceit looks good on him.

"What am I supposed to do?” Theon says. “Do I have to tell you how disobedient I've been? Because we're going to be here for a fucking while."

"You could start by shutting up."

Theon complies, just as the phone finally stops ringing. He allows Jon to stare at him for about ten seconds of relative silence. Then he caves in.

"I did wonder about the kind of thing that might turn you on. I figured it would have something to do with authority." He braces himself against the back of the chair and whispers, his lips close to Jon’s ear, "Tell me then. How long do I have to go on, before you make good on these promises of yours?"

And the bastard smells good, too, though Theon should have expected that, given how often he's joked with Robb about the excessive care that Jon takes in his appearance, especially his hair.

"Promises," Jon murmurs. "What promises?"

"Fuck me," Theon swears, slightly appalled, because it's one thing to flirt with Jon at a distance, just for the sake of it, and another to have Jon sitting sprawled on a desk chair like some arrogant prince on a throne, loose-limbed and amused, with a rare smile playing upon his lips.

"On your knees," Jon tells him.

Something holds him up for a second – a stupid, irksome little thought – _Robb would have been biting his lip; he would have been tapping his foot_ – so that he doesn’t kneel so much as he lets himself fall, as if to trample any hesitation he might have had.

"I've heard a rumour," he says, fingers working at Jon's belt, "that you're really good at this." Jon is already half-hard, and Theon makes sure to slide the tips of his fingers down the front of his pants, just to watch him shift uncomfortably upon the seat.

"Good at what? Bossing people around?”

"Good at going down on people," Theon says. "I heard that, contrary to all appearances..." – he slides his fingers underneath the waistband of Jon's boxers, freeing his cock – "... you have a very filthy mouth."

“You won’t get to find out,” Jon tells him. “I’m not the one who has to make amends – I’m not the one who’s at risk of being fired. I haven’t been... having sex with employees in the copy room. Sending inappropriate messages to my boss.”

“You’re not my boss,” Theon feels obligated to point out, if only because it was a hassle to fix the statutes so he’d be Robb’s subordinate, but not Jon’s.

“Really?”

Jon touches the side of his face, cautiously at first, though his hand soon wraps around Theon’s neck and he squeezes, sliding slightly down on the chair so his cock rubs against Theon’s mouth.

“Care to repeat that?”

“Who are you,” Theon mutters, his lips moving against warm skin, “and what have you done to Jon Snow?”

Jon’s hand curves around his neck, his fingers winding in the hair at his nape. He takes his cock firmly in hand and presses the tip to Theon’s lips, coming up against his clenched teeth.

“Open up, Greyjoy.”

 _Okay. Whatever comes of this, it was definitely worth it,_ Theon thinks as he opens his mouth. He’s reasonably sure he’s never been harder in his life.

As far as blowjobs go, he’s not an expert – he’s fucked more girls than guys, and most of the time he was on the receiving end. But it turns out it doesn’t really matter, and that the both of them can get off on Jon giving him orders, even as he thrusts into Theon’s mouth, even as his voice falters with each shaky exhale.

“Watch it – less teeth, less... God, yes. More of... More of this. Take it. Take it all in.”

And, “Don’t be a tease, Greyjoy,” when Theon draws back as far as Jon’s grip on his neck will allow, briefly sucking on the tip of Jon’s cock before he allows himself to be pushed back down.

It’s not the most comfortable of positions, holding on to Jon’s thighs as his knees start to smart against the hard floor, and with his chin chafing against Jon’s fly. But he makes do, and he lets Jon choose his rhythm. He’s not exactly surprised when it turns out that the bastard likes it painfully slow.

“Good boy,” Jon rasps.

Theon nearly chokes, and makes his indignation be heard with a strangled sound.

“I’ll be thinking about this,” Jon tells him, “the next time you dare open your mouth in the conference room.”

There’s something quite pleasing about that thought (Jon in the conference room, his face frozen in that mask of handsome indifference as he pictures himself fucking Theon’s mouth) – enough so that Theon hooks his fingers in Jon’s belt loops and pulls him down further, his nose coming up against the dark hair at the base of Jon’s cock.

Jon replies by rocking his hips, his grip tight on Theon’s neck, and he’s finally picking up the pace – forgetting to hold back – when the damn phone starts ringing again, annoyingly loud, somewhere on the desk.

Jon’s hand leaves Theon’s neck, presumably to hunt for the phone and turn it off. Theon makes use of this reprieve to sit back on his heels and take a gulp of air.

“Why don’t you?” he says, as Jon’s hand finds the phone. “Just pick up.”

Jon shoots him a startled look. He hasn’t had time to catch his breath, and there’s something soft about his surprise, as if he’d forgotten that he was supposed to play a part. Theon smirks and resumes his prior position, kneeling between his legs. He wraps a hand around Jon’s cock and brings it to his mouth, his tongue darting out to tease the slit.

Jon emits a confused groan. Straightening up slightly, he tears his gaze away from Theon and looks back towards the phone. He lets a couple more rings go by before he picks up.

“Jon Snow speaking,” he says, running a distracted hand through his hair. Theon has to give it to him – his voice barely wavers.

“I can send it to you.” Jon’s fingers skirt along Theon’s jaw, his thumb stroking Theon’s chin and then pressing down to coax his mouth open further before he pushes back in. “Yeah, they gave me the update. I have it h –”

He hisses. Placing his palm against the receiver, he mouths, “Did you bite me?”, bumping Theon’s shoulder with his knee.

“...Yes, I think we’ll be able to work with what they sent. That’s a lot of flowers, but I understand Theon is... working on it.”

Theon draws back long enough to say “fuck you”, with feeling and maybe a little too loud.

“Yes, I’m meeting with him right now,” Jon says, holding Theon’s gaze. Theon experiences a weird dissonance, where he’s able at once to see Jon like he’s always seen him (sad and a little dull) and yet where he also gets a glimpse of something else, snowdrifts and pitfalls. “Yes, you know how he is. All bark and no...” – eyes shut tight, lips shut against a bitten-back cry – “bite,” Jon finishes. “Robb, I’ll... talk to you later.”

He drops the phone on the desk and slumps back in his chair. “You’re a right prick,” he mutters.

After that he gives up on being patient, and with a hand fisted in Theon’s hair he begins to quicken his thrusts. His cock hits the back of Theon’s throat, again and again until Theon begins to think that he might well choke on it, the whole experience – Jon’s cock in his mouth and how much he’s wanted it, and how much he’s wanted and still wants Jon, contrary to everything he held as truth until this very morning.

Jon pulls out in time, surprising Theon, though maybe he should have expected this: Jon remembering his manners in the heat of the moment, sparing his mouth in favour of coming in his own fist. Jon leans down to catch his breath, his forehead bumping against Theon’s. Theon tilts his head back, not quite aware of what he’s doing until he feels Jon’s breath against his lips.

"We're not the kissing kind, are we?" Theon whispers.

Jon lets out a shaky breath that sounds like a laugh. He sits up, searches his desk for a tissue and wipes his hand.

"What about me?" Theon asks. He sits back on his heels. Jon's gaze flickers towards his crotch.

"You can finish yourself off," he says, after a beat. "I'll watch."

He leans back against the chair as Theon unfastens his pants and takes himself in hand. He can tell it won't take long, not with Jon watching him with that sullen stare. So he works himself with quick, uneven strokes, keeping his eyes on Jon all the while – on his still erratic breath, on his open trousers and his unmoving eyes – and just as he feels that he's getting close, Jon drops to his knees and pushes his hand away.

Theon latches onto the desk with one hand, pulling himself up on unsteady legs. His other hand holds on fast to fistfuls of silky black hair, as Jon proceeds to demonstrate just how true the rumours were (undeniably and alarmingly true, in Theon's rather enlightened opinion).

"Jon," he warns.

The least he can do, after all, is to return the favour, and let Jon withdraw in time. He’s rewarded with a quick upward glance, before Jon does something with his tongue that has Theon spilling down his throat with a great shudder and a final, broken curse.

He looks on without quite being able to see as Jon stands up and wipes his mouth. He tucks his chequered shirt in his pants and smooths down his rumpled jumper. Once he’s done, he casts Theon a glance, raising his eyebrows.

"You okay?"

"Yeah. Yeah," Theon says, moving to adjust his own clothes, his shaky fingers skidding on his fly. "I'll leave you to it."

It's only when he's about to open the door that some of his usual bite returns, and he turns back, one hand already curled around the jamb.

"I've bought your silence then? For the copy room... and all the other rooms where that kind of encounter might have occurred, I guess."

Jon frowns.

"Not here, you didn't."

"It's fine," Theon says, a little high-pitched – apparently, the air hasn’t quite returned to his lungs yet. "I'm pretty sure we just reclaimed the place."


	4. Chapter 4

It happened for the first time in an alley behind the club, with snow up to their ankles and Theon trying as best he could not to put too much weight on Robb’s still broken body.

Theon had filched some hand lotion from the bathroom, after they’d tried and failed to secure a stall. They were put off by the queue and by the drunken stares, eyes sliding over their faces to stop at their joined hands. And maybe they’d forget about it later, all of these young men and women that Robb knew from the slopes, and that Theon mostly knew from such parties, where they spent the remainder of their adrenaline in a whirlwind of drinking and dancing and fucking. But he couldn’t be sure of it, and so it had seemed wiser to take Robb outside, and to put some distance between them and the club – two or three alleys-removed from the pounding basses.

Theon remembers swearing a lot – as he smeared most of the lotion down his front, as he struggled with his belt, as he caught his first glimpse of Robb’s naked arse in the faint light of a distant streetlamp.

“Nobody will come this far,” he told Robb. “It’s too fucking cold.”

“Like I give a damn if someone does."

“Tell me if I hurt you.”

 _And please, please don’t say that you want me to,_ he remembers thinking, because the unspoken thought was already hanging heavy in the air between them. Voicing it would have put an ugly spin on things.

And it must have hurt – looking back on it with what one might call the benefit of experience – but Robb didn’t complain once. He bit his lip hard enough that it was swollen afterwards and both his hands were curled into fists against the wall, but the only thing Theon heard him say was “Again”, with every thrust, even as Theon’s arm tightened around his waist and threatened to cut off his breath, even as Theon forgot himself to the point of sinking his teeth in his shoulder.

Other things Theon remembers from that night: how it had felt to lean against Robb’s back afterwards, with his spent cock pressed against Robb’s arse and his arms wrapped around Robb’s middle, holding him up.

And the hour that followed, smoking in the back of Jon’s car with Robb’s head in his lap and his hand hanging out the window to keep the cigarette away from Robb’s precious lungs. They’d left the door open on Robb’s side, so he could fully extend his injured leg.

When Jon showed up, at what must have been four, five in the morning, the car keys jingling in his hand, Robb had fallen asleep and the puddle beneath the window was a graveyard of soggy cigarette ends.

“You’ll have to wake him,” Jon said. “I’m not driving with the backdoor open and his feet sticking out.”

“You want to wake him? Be my guest.”

So they sat in silence for a while, Jon behind the wheel and Theon in the back, with Robb drooling on his pants, like some bearded Sleeping Beauty.

In the end no one had to kiss Robb to wake him up. He came to on his own, blue eyes blinking against the glare of the overhead lamp.

“What time is it?”

“Time to get you to a proper bed,” Jon said. “Stick your head out, throw up, tuck your legs in and off we go.”

Theon had felt so smug on the ride home – as the wind whipped his hair through the open window and he smiled at the darkened landscape, black cut-outs of mountains and tiny pinpricks of stars.

God, he’d felt like a king. For so long everyone had wanted a piece of Robb. The entire world seemed to be after him. And now Theon had had him, and the world could go fuck itself.

After careful consideration, Theon forgets his phone at work.

He’s pulled out of bed in the middle of the night by a loud banging on the door. Once it becomes clear the banging won’t stop, he starts hunting around for the light switch, and then for a pair of pants.

At 4am on a weekday, Theon would bet that it’s either a drunkard – since he lives in what passes for a town centre in these parts – or his sister, who has an annoying tendency to forget that regular people sleep at night.

“I was on Bear Island,” Asha says, her voice far too loud considering she’s just woken him from a deep sleep. “So it took me a while to drive back.”

She dumps her rucksack in the hall and promptly shakes out a cigarette from her crumpled, waterlogged pack.

“And you drove back... why?” Asha holds out the pack, but Theon waves it away. “Not at four in the morning. Why are you here?”

“Because you as good as admitted to fucking Jon Snow. And you wouldn’t answer your phone.”

“I left it at work.” Theon steeples his hands over his nose. “You drove from _Bear Island_ because I wouldn’t answer my phone?”

“It was a nice drive, actually,” Asha says, preceding him into the living room. “Very scenic.” She drops into the couch and lifts her muddy, booted feet onto the coffee table.

Theon finds enough energy to rush over and seize her around the ankles, pushing her feet to the ground.

“Not the table. Sansa would kill me. If you can stay put for two minutes, I’ll fix you a cup of coffee.”

“Fair enough."

She must have had quite a lot of coffee already, because she goes on chatting even as he heads off to the kitchen. At least, her voice serves to keep him moderately awake, while he pours water into the coffee-maker and finds a clean filter and scrapes the bottom of his coffee tin.

“Since when does Sansa buy you furniture? I never understood why people would want a table with a glass top. It seems ridiculously breakable. Is she still working with the Tyrell girl? What’s her name again. Margaery? That girl was a tease alright. Did you fuck her too? Or do you only fuck boys, these days? I guess we could make a case for Stark and Snow being men. I can’t believe you fucked both your bosses.”

“Snow is _not_ my boss,” Theon interjects from the kitchen.  
  
"Oh yeah? Not in the office, then. And in bed?"  
  
Theon takes a second to compose himself before he walks back into the living room.

"I can't believe you drove eight hours for this," he sighs, stuffing the steaming mug into her outstretched hands. "Just because you wanted to know if Snow prefers to top. Which I wouldn't know, by the way." He drops into the couch at her side, taking a sip of his own scalding coffee. "I blew him, he blew me, and that was that."

"Ooooh," Asha croons, with a knowing grin. "Are the rumours true, then? Because I heard that..."

"Yes, the rumours are true," Theon cuts in, waving his hand impatiently. "He has a pretty mouth and he knows how to use it. But that's not what I wanted to talk about..."

"You didn't just fall headfirst on Snow's cock, did you? I mean, last I knew you couldn't be bothered to remember that he worked in the same firm as you, despite the fact that his _name's on the door._.."

"We texted," Theon says by way of explanation. "I don't really know what to do about the fact that Robb knows, though. I didn't expect him to give a damn."

"Really. You didn't do it specifically to make him mad? Because that sounds a lot like you, little brother."

Theon swallows another mouthful of coffee as he ponders her question. Asha might be annoying, but he’s found out it’s generally wise to heed her advice, no matter how crudely she phrases it.

“Maybe I did,” he says. “We had this party the other night. He spent it flirting with a girl.”

“He’s always been popular though, that boy. It’s those baby blues. Works like a charm with the dark beard.”

“It’s not that kind of girl.”

Asha kicks his bare ankle with a booted foot, ignoring his cry of outrage. “Don’t. There’s no such thing as ‘that kind of girl’. Don’t be a corporate douchebag.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Theon snaps, in part because he doesn’t like to be made to feel guilty by a woman who doesn’t treat her girlfriends any better than he does his. “She’s different from the girls he usually goes for, that’s all. Shy and cute. That kind. His previous girlfriends were knockouts with an attitude.”

“My baby brother,” Asha chortles, leaning forward to ruffle his dark hair. “The knockout with an attitude.”

“Can you _stop_ being a bitch for a second...”

Asha kicks his foot again.

“Ouch!”

“Don’t call me a bitch.”

“You called me a douchebag!”

“Oh, that’s different,” she says, waving an airy hand. “I get to call you whatever I want. Privilege of being the older sibling.”

“This conversation is going nowhere.” He sets his mug down, remembering at the last second to fish a coaster from the floor so he won’t damage Sansa’s table. “I’m going to bed.”

“The hell you are. Not after I drove eight hours to get here.”

“We can talk in the morning,” Theon says, with that careless tone that she hates, probably because it sounds too much like her own.

“I know you. You’ll be gone before I wake up. It’s your MO, isn’t it?”

“Fuck you,” Theon calls out, affectionately, as he walks back towards his bedroom. “There’s a spare pillow in the cupboard down the hall.”

“Is he in yet?”

Mya looks up at him, raising a pale blond eyebrow. She points her silver pen at the glass box behind her. “Obviously?”

“If you’d said no, I could have just taken your word for it and gone back to my office. Really, you should consider doing me favours, sometimes. It’d be in your interest.”

“I don’t think it would be in my interest to disobey him, and he asked to see you,” she says. “I take it this has something to do with you?”

“This what?” Theon asks, false smile firmly in place as he avoids to look behind her, at where Robb is leaning out the window of his office, his hunched shoulders pulling at the seams of his white shirt.

“Him smoking,” Mya says. “So what happened? You stole his girlfriend and now he’s smoking?”

“Robb doesn’t smoke,” Theon answers, mechanically, as he goes around her to open the door.

Except that he is, and properly at that, hollowing his cheeks with every drag as if he wanted the damn things to kill him as fast as possible. Theon is torn between an impulse to snatch the cigarette from his hand, and an even greater compulsion to stay put and stare.

"I suppose you remember we're having lunch with the Freys," Robb says. Concave cheeks, cloud of smoke. Theon blinks.  
  
"Lunch? What?"

"I'd have thought Roslin would have reminded you. Well, cancel your plans. I need you there. Every time I speak to the old bugger I walk away feeling like I've accidentally nuked the restaurant. We need their money."

"Okay," Theon says, though Asha won't be happy about it. It’s not really within his means to argue: in all likelihood, the luncheon is marked down in his schedule and he's forgotten about it.

"Fine. Get the fuck out."

So they're not going to discuss the Jon situation. Theon can deal with that; after all, repression is the Greyjoy family motto.

"Okay," he repeats. For a second he just lingers, his fingers twitching. Then he snaps. Darting forward, he grabs the cigarette and throws it out the window.

"Your fucking lungs, mate."

It looks as if Robb might strike him. In any case, he wants to. Theon can read it in the coiled muscles of his arms, in the tense set of his jaw.

He's always found it easier to grab the can of petrol rather than the fire extinguisher. With a vague gesture in the direction of Robb's crotch, he asks, "How's your little problem?"

Robb does punch him then, square in the jaw. He’s wearing that stupid ring Sansa got him all those years ago ( _“Because you’re married to that sport, and I think people should know_ ”). It catches on Theon’s lips and he spits blood onto the polished concrete.

“Great.” He tries to work his jaw. “Glad we got that out in the open.”

“Don’t be late,” Robb says, turning back towards the window and reaching for the pack of cigarettes. Yet he stops short of seizing it, remembering Theon’s warning, maybe. This unwitting concession must rankle, because he slams his fist down on the windowsill.

“Fuck.”  
  
This time Theon does beat a cautious retreat.

“What the hell did you do?” Mya asks, as he strides past her desk. “Theon?”

Theon keeps walking, sucking on his split lip, his jaw still smarting from the blow. Robb’s aim was impeccable – it usually is. Theon just isn’t used to being on the receiving end.


	5. Chapter 5

Walder Frey has half a dozen sons to whom he could sign off his business. It’d allow him to retire, live the remainder of his life with his newest wife – he’s had a string of them over the past few years, all of them pretty and conventionally attractive – but he likes to have a finger in every pie. They’ll pry the company from his cold dead hands.

Theon’s reasonably certain that if you were to ask the new wife, that’s how she’d describe Walder’s hands. Cold and dead.

“And last month father bought a new boat for the national rowing team,” one of the Frey sons says. Theon keeps getting them mixed up. It could be Stev. It could be Ryger. They share messy grey beards and too-large ties.

“How generous,” Theon says.

It’s always the same with the Freys. You can ask about the contract outright, before the starters have been served, and they’ll still find a way to delay the proposal until Walder has sucked in the last drop of his custard between purplish lips.

“I like to play my part,” Walder croons, as his hand blindly gropes for his wife’s knee, landing on her breast instead. He leaves it there.

Theon doesn’t need to look at Robb to guess what he’s thinking. _Do we need his money that much, or can I fling my wine in his face?_

He gives a slight kick to Robb’s foot under the table. _We do. You can’t._

“While we’re on the subject of your kind contributions to...”

Theon kicks Robb again, effectively shutting him up.

“I’ve heard of the grant you gave the Northern Archery Club,” he says. “Roose Bolton must have been overjoyed. The club building hasn’t been holding up well.”

“I like to reward my friends,” Walder says with a complacent smile. “But you’re not eating, Maron.”

“Theon. Maron was my brother.”  
  
“The one who died,” the Frey son reminds his father in an audible whisper.

“Both my brothers died, actually,” Theon says. “That’s what happens when you decide to be the first to cross Ironman’s Bay in the storm season.”

“Your brothers had guts,” Walder says, leaning back in his chair, his rapacious eyes following every shift in Theon’s expression. “Are the snails not to your liking?”

Theon spears one of the little grey coils with his fork and bites down on it with a smile that’s all teeth.

“Very thoughtful of you to order ahead,” he says, washing down the snail with a swig of wine. “I never know what to get in these posh restaurants, anyways.”

“It takes guts to face a storm,” Walder muses softly. “I’m surprised you didn’t try to finish what your brothers started.”

“You should take that up with my sister. She’s a better seaman than I am, though these days you’ll mostly find her on shore. Designing tankers.”

“It’s a man’s journey, anyways,” says the Frey son on the other side of Walder. “Facing the elements and staying on course against all odds...”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Theon smiles, with a pleased thought about Asha's face when he’ll relay that comment to her.

“What about you, young Stark?” Walder asks. “Do you have any intention to take up a sport again?”

“Not skiing at any rate,” Robb says.

“What a shame.”

Theon anticipates Robb’s anger before Robb has fully realized it himself, and because he can’t say a thing without it being too obvious, he puts his hand on Robb’s knee and squeezes.

Robb’s mother had wanted to take the Freys to court after Robb’s accident, because it had happened on their slope, and she blamed them wholeheartedly. The Starks’ lawyer eventually convinced them that it wasn’t worth it. That the Freys would win. Robb had been tipsy that night – not much. Enough that it’d matter.

Walder Frey had sent Robb flowers, and a box of heart-shaped chocolates.

Robb’s knee seems to vibrate under Theon’s hand, in rhythm with the restless tapping of his foot. Theon searches for something to say that would defuse the situation.

It’s not easy, when his head is overrun with memories of his trip to the hospital in the wake of the accident. Sansa sleeping curled up in one of the plastic chairs and Arya's unwavering gaze, the untouched tray of food and the already numerous flowers by the door.

And Robb's bandaged hands, because he'd dragged himself down the slope, an exact six hundred feet before he could get enough signal to make a call.

"Do you know what's really a shame?" he says. Luckily perhaps, he doesn't get to finish.

"Father-in-law!"

Robb's uncle appears, with his young bride in tow. The lovely Roslin Tully, formerly Roslin Frey. There occurs a brief moment of confusion as everyone exchanges greetings and Roslin goes to kiss her father on both saggy cheeks.

Theon wonders if Edmure timed this arrival on purpose. It's highly probable that he didn't, and that he accidentally showed up at exactly the right time. That's rather how Edmure tends to be: accidentally useful.

Robb excuses himself.  
  
"How have you been?" Roslin asks Theon.

Edmure and Walder are busy hailing a waiter so the young couple might join them, despite the fact that this was supposed to be a business luncheon.

"Good," Theon replies. He tries to focus on her shiny chestnut hair and on her doe-eyed graces for all of five seconds before giving up. "I'm sorry, I'll be right back."

Robb has left his cane leaning against a potted plant behind their table. Theon picks it up along the way.

One of the waitresses gives him a look as he knocks on the door of the men's bathroom, though he dismisses it with a quick smile. The girl can't help smiling back. It works more often than it should.

Robb's not in the bathroom, however, and Theon just stands there, refusing to consider that Robb might have left him alone with the Freys, until he remembers the smoking.

Sure enough, Robb is outside the restaurant, kicking at the curb with his patent leather shoes.

Theon joins him, pulling out his own cigarettes. They don't speak at first.

The restaurant is in a quaint little street a few feet away from a busy boulevard, and above them it's all cascading plants and multicoloured façades. It looks like the south, only colder, and with enough of the north that a southerner might laugh and point. The shop across from them sells the kind of wooden furniture that only tourists would buy, with the backs of chairs hollowed out in a pattern of hearts and mountain goats. The hotel next to the shop has goddamn flowery drapes. No wonder Frey likes the place. The hotel is even called "The Ski Chalet." He might as well have snatched the cane in his gnarly hands and kicked Robb's legs out from under him.

"Here," Theon says, propping the offensive piece of metal against the nearest wall. Stepping closer to Robb, he motions towards his unlit cigarette. "Fire?"

Robb scowls but he produces a lighter. Theon leans in and takes a deep drag. Walder's jeering must have had more effect than he'd thought, because from the moment he blows out the first mouthful of smoke he feels himself relax. They both take a step back, and Robb shoves the lighter in the pocket of his pea coat. Theon should probably have lifted his coat from his chair too, but that would have meant circling back to the table on his way out. He’d taken one look at Walder Frey's batrachian posture and lecherous eyes and he’d decided otherwise.

"How's your jaw?"  
  
Theon pulls a face. "How do you think? How does it look?"

"Like you got punched in the face," Robb says, gruffly.

"Do you want to have another go before we go back?" Theon asks. "We're here for at least another two, three hours I'd say." He cocks his head, offering the as-yet-unbruised side of his jaw. "Enjoy."

"God knows you deserve it."

"For fuck's sake, will you stop smoking," Theon says, the mockery driven out of his voice by the sight of Robb's parted lips. It's a family trait that Robb shares with Jon, this deadly full lips and insolent stare combination that has Theon's cock twitching like it doesn't give a damn whether the timing is appropriate or not.

"You used to be better at finding ways to wind me down," Robb remarks, still pulling on that damn cigarette.

"Depends how angry you are," Theon says. "Angry enough. Not angry enough?"  
  
"For what?"

The receptionist gives them the dirtiest glare Theon's ever been on the receiving end of, and that includes years spent hanging around Sansa, and a hundred or so difficult morning-afters.

"An hour," she repeats.  
  
"Yeah. We have a business transaction to make, and it has to happen in private."

"Important phone calls," Robb says. "Before we go back to our meeting across the street."

He smiles. Robb has the kind of smile that gives you butterflies, wide and sunny and all too blinding because of the bright blue eyes. When they had him pose for shoots, they'd often tone down the sky behind him so there wouldn't be too much blue in the one picture.

"I'm sorry," the girl says. "It has to be 24 hours at least."

"Book us for 24 hours, then," Theon shrugs. "The company's paying."

She shoots him another unimpressed glance. He's used to this. Robb and him have very different brands of charm. There are situations where people see straight past his looks and the vacancy of his smile. Since Robb's at least 50% sunshine and puppies under the scruffy beard and the neon blue eyes, he's more likely to obtain a positive reaction, especially with Theon standing next to him.

"Enjoy your stay, Mr Stark," the receptionist says, handing his card back to Robb. "If I may... I'm terribly sorry about your accident."

Theon should have expected as much, in a hotel called The Ski Chalet. As they head towards the elevator, they even walk past a poster of Robb and Jon. Theon can tell the girl's well-wishes have rattled Robb, and so he launches at him from the moment the elevator doors have closed, pushing him back against the wall and licking the inside of his mouth, his eyes shut in frightened rapture. It's been over a year, but they might as well have never stopped, for the swiftness with which they reassume old patterns, Robb's hand wrapping around the back of his neck, his other hand palming Theon's arse as he grinds their cocks together. Everything just like it was, but for the fact that unless they slow down, Theon will come in his pants a mere ten seconds after they’ve started.

"I need you," Robb grumbles, "to brush your teeth. You smell... you smell like garlic."

"Blame Walder Frey," Theon snorts, pushing his hand back through Robb's brown curls and trying not to vocalise how good it feels. Robb's hair was made to be clutched at, preferably with both hands as his head moves between your legs, but Theon won't be picky, that's fine too, Robb's beard rubbing against his bruised jaw, Robb's hand squeezing his arse as he mumbles, "Bet I can get you to come before we're in the room."

"Probably. But you... you need me to get back to the restaurant. Afterwards. And f... for that, I need clean pants."

Somehow they manage to hold off until they get to the room, although Robb's hand remains on Theon's arse, as if he'd need guiding.

"Someone checks these cameras and all this convincing bullshit you spun about a business meeting will go out the window," Theon notes.

"Shut up," Robb says, shoving him inside the room.

Theon would comment upon how similar to Jon Robb sounded in that moment, bossy and horny and a tad bit regal, but he doesn't know how that would go down, so he backs obligingly into the room and against the bed when Robb begins to pull at his belt.

Back when they last were together - though perhaps that's not the best way to phrase it - back when they last fucked, rather, Theon got to be the bossy one. He’d had Robb begging for it and it was the headiest feeling.

Obviously this isn't what Robb needs now. It might have to do with Walder Frey and it might have to do with Jon, but Theon isn't about to complain. He doesn't complain as Robb pushes him down face-first on the bed and he doesn't complain throughout the whole uncomfortable process of being finger-fucked with the herbal-smelling shower gel. For old times’ sake, etc. If he'd known he'd have come prepared, but there are limits even to his smugness, and assuming Robb would want to fuck him mid-luncheon is one of them.

"This better improve your mood," he hisses through gritted teeth as Robb adds a third finger. If this is how it felt for Robb that first time, outside the club with Theon's overeager fingers rammed up his arse, it's a wonder he came back for more. Again and again and another hundred more times.

"Already has."

Robb's voice sounds strange enough that Theon twists around, trying to see what has him sounding so thoughtful.

"Oh, you don't get to look at me," Robb says. "For once you're gonna take it in silence. Think you can do that?"

"It's hilarious to me that you'd both share a fantasy of me silent and on my knees. I hope that's not crucial to getting you off because we'd... _Fuck._ Fucking... _Robb_. Not all at once. Did no one ever teach you anything?"

"If you mean you," Robb says, and Theon can feel him relaxing, his cock pushing in deeper, "you taught me to take whatever I wanted and not give a fuck."

"I've gotta be able to walk back to the restaurant and..." He shuts his eyes and groans. "Okay. Okay don't stop.”

The way his body clenches around Robb's cock is muscle memory, though maybe he'd shrunk him in retrospect, unless it's that he hasn't let anyone fuck him like this in a year. Theon still thrusts back against him, half out of desperation and half out of sheer pigheadedness. He’s rewarded when Robb finds that one spot that has him issue a new string of curses as his head drops to the mattress.

"Fuck it", Robb grunts. "Keep talking."

Theon doesn't need the encouragement.

"You wish you could have done it back there, don't you? I know that shit gets you hard. Remember that time... the time... Oh fuck. Fuck. Just..." He tries to remember what he'd been about to say, but Robb's quickened pace – his quickened breathing – is making it hard to focus. Theon can taste blood on his tongue from where he's gone and bitten his barely-mended lip.

Robb's hand slides into his hair, and he leans down and whispers, "Why did you cut it? I used to have a better grip."

"I can grow it back... if that's... a turn on."

"You didn't finish."

Draped over Theon's back, Robb can't manage much more than a lazy echo of his previously harsh rhythm, but he doesn't seem to mind, and to be fair Theon doesn't mind either. He's wanted little else for months. Not necessarily the sex. Just the physical contact - to get close enough to touch. Robb's fist colliding with his jaw had about as much effect as that kiss in the elevator. So that now he thinks he might go delirious with how good it feels - Robb above and inside him with too many points of contact between their bodies for him to keep count.

"Finish," Robb says, with enough of a stutter that Theon can tell he's close. "Go on. Finish."

"The time we came across... fans of yours. At the _Icepick_. And you let me... under the table. You let me blow you under the table."

It's a memory he hasn't dared touch with a ten-foot pole until now. Aside from the fact that he's been trying very hard not to think about these drunken encounters, there's also the shameful certainty that it must have been the worst blowjob Robb's ever gotten. It was Theon's first. He had no idea what he was doing.

But Robb had gotten so damn hard so damn fast. Theon could hear him talking, shouting to be heard over the pounding music as he answered questions about his golden years, and all the while his hand rubbed Theon's neck as if he'd been some dog slobbering over his shoes rather than...

Whatever it was that he'd been to Robb, back then. The most untrustworthy of friends. The only friend he'd trust enough to fuck. A hard cock and a warm mouth, just within reach of his suddenly inexhaustible drive.

"You've always had... the dirtiest mouth," Robb says, like he'll never stop being amazed by it, like it's something to be proud of.

He braces himself on Theon's back and drives in one last time, with a shuddering groan.

"Fuck you," Theon says, as he collapses on the bed. "You could have... Fuck, that lunch is gonna be uncomfortable."

"That's an idea." Robb sounds winded. There's a sudden sweep of cold air against Theon's bare skin as Robb withdraws.

"Don't move," Robb orders. "Don't touch yourself."

"Robb..."

He hisses at the brutal, unexpected slap of metal against his ass.

"Did you just _cane_ me?"

"God knows I should have done that months ago," Robb says, and Theon hears him walk off towards the bathroom.

He returns with a towel and makes at least a passable attempt at cleaning the mess he's made, though there's little to be done about the state of the sheets. There's a small brown stain near Theon’s head, where he spat out the blood from his split lip.

"Get dressed," Robb tells him. "We're going back."

"Like this?" Theon asks, gesturing at his hard cock with mild amusement. "Seriously?"

"Seriously."

There's no denying that Robb is at a distinct advantage - dressed and sated and holding that cane like he wants nothing more than to bring it down upon Theon's ass again.

"Starks," Theon mutters, though he sits up and reaches for his underwear.

Jon and Robb might not share a last name, but there can be no doubt that they're related.

"You kinky bastards."

Robb's blue eyes are dreadfully cold when he says, "If you touch Jon again, I'll have both your heads on a platter. Find someone else for your twisted games. He deserves better."

"You both do, that's for sure," Theon says as he pulls up his pants. He can’t help wincing as he drags the zipper over his cock. "I might give it a day or two. Give that bruise time to change colours. Did it help, at least?"

Robb gives him a considering look. "Punching you?"  
  
"Is that what we're going to call it? Okay. Did it help, when you punched me with your dick?"

"I can't deal with you," Robb sighs, turning away.

When they return, Walder Frey has started in on his dessert. Robb's uncle is still here, valiantly holding up his end of the conversation, and as they come closer Theon hears Roslin say, "I'm sure they'll come back."

"Sorry," Theon says. "Emergency back at the office. We had to call in and sort things out."

The "sorting out" mostly involved him pinning Robb to the wall of the elevator and grinding against his leg until he came with a drawn-out curse. He'd then had to swing by his flat to get a clean pair of pants, which had delayed them further, though not as much as if he'd lived in some house up on the mountain, as Robb did, or if he'd found Asha at his flat. Thankfully, she'd been out.

All in all, he considers himself lucky that they only disappeared for a couple hours, and that he’ll get to enjoy the rest of this fucked up meeting without a raging hard-on.

"I don't appreciate being treated lightly," Frey remarks, his pale eyes fixated on Theon's unapologetic face.

"As it so happens," Robb says, dropping into his chair, "neither do I.”

He hooks the cane over his armrest, which Theon's learned to read as a sign that he's doing okay - more than okay, generally. When Robb hides the cane, he’s feeling under-the-weather. When he owns up to it... It's a sudden reawakening of the Robb who'd climb over mountains in the middle of the night to throw himself down impossible slopes. A welcome and rather dangerous sight.

“It's all a question of what you mean by 'treating lightly',” Robb says. “I suppose missing most of an important business dinner would qualify. But I’ve got another one for you, and this one’s trickier. What about... what about a man who leaves bare patches of ground under, say, an inch of fake snow, on the day he’s invited a national champion to come train on his slope? Is that treating the champion lightly? Some people might call it foul play. I don't know. I hear our lawyers are still debating the question."

There's a tense silence, broken only by Walder's wheezing breath.  
  
"How much do you want?", the old man says, at last.  
  
"Well, I wasn't going to bring it up," Robb smiles. His poster smile, wide and white and positively blinding. "But I'm glad you asked."


	6. Chapter 6

“Okay,” Jon says, bracing himself on Theon’s knees as he gets back on his feet. “I’ve got to run.”

“What?” Theon garbles, still a little blissed out. His whole body feels weightless. There’s no way he’ll manage to lift his head from the chair, so he just looks up at Jon without moving, as Jon snatches a tissue from the box on Theon’s desk and wipes his (obscene) mouth.

“I have a plane to catch,” Jon says. “I have to be in Winterfell by nightfall. I was already supposed to be there this week to train. Thorne will have my head.” He gives a passable imitation of his coach’s sneer. “No one can expect to even finish the Torch Race who hasn’t been training night and day for at least _six months_ , Snow. If you don’t haul your skinny arse back to Winterfell by Monday, you can forget about that trophy. You can forget about your goddamn career.”

“Wait. The Torch Race is _tomorrow_?”

This does cause Theon to straighten up.

“Tomorrow night, yeah,” Jon shrugs.

“And you spent the week here doing... What, paperwork? That interview with Baelish? Don’t tell me you stayed because of the _office party._ ”

“It was the first year anniversary of our firm. I’ll be fine.”

“You fucking lunatic.”

“Theon, I’ll be fine.”

“I remember what you looked like the last time I saw you come back from this thing. You looked like a damn skeleton!”

“That’s different. That was two years ago. I came straight from the race to the hospital. I hadn’t slept in forty-eight hours.”

Theon had found a handful of spare change in his pocket for Jon to get a coffee at the vending machine. Jon’s skin looked blue in the dull light of the waiting room. He’d kicked the machine twice when it wouldn’t give him his coffee, and he’d been about to do it a third time when Theon had gotten up, walked over and punched the espresso button with an irritated frown. Jon had looked at him like he’d gladly have kicked him too. The ribbon of his medal (gold, always gold) was hanging from his pocket.

“Get that the fuck away before Robb wakes up,” Theon had said, and he’d added, nastily, “congrats, by the way.”

Theon rises from his desk chair, zipping up his trousers. “If you don’t feel ready, just pull out, mate. There’s always next year.”

“You know it doesn’t work like that,” Jon says, running a hand through his hair. “And I told you, I’ll be fine. I’ll see you Monday, then.”

“I know you like to think you’re invincible and shit, but you saw where that led us, Robb and me...”

“I’m being lectured by Theon Greyjoy,” Jon snorts. “Unbelievable. I’ll see you Monday, okay? Keep an eye on Robb.”

“Hey,” Theon calls, as Jon’s about to walk out the door.

Jon turns back, harried and expectant. Theon can’t help wondering why he’s wasted a good ten years dismissing Jon as a wallflower when he might have had this the whole time – not so much Jon the famous athlete or Jon the thrill-seeker or even Jon the cute guy you’d be as likely to parade as to fuck, but this stubborn idiot, with the stupid hair and the soft, close-lipped smiles.

_Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck._

“You win that thing, I’ll let you bend me over the desk."

“And fuck you?” Jon asks, candid. (Falsely candid?)

“Yeah, I mean, unless you have other fantasies?” Theon says with raised eyebrows. “That’s generally what people have in mind when they say, ‘I’ll bend you over the desk’. They don’t mean I’ll use you as a fucking paperweight.”

“You’re too unstable to be used as a paperweight,” Jon remarks, opening the door.

 _Falsely candid. The little shit._ This too Theon should have known – that there’d be more to Jon than that guileless-smile, ski-pole-up-the-ass demeanour.

Theon’s already turned back towards his computer when he hears Jon’s voice rising from the other end of the corridor.

“It’s a deal, Greyjoy.”

“Got any week-end plans?” Mya asks him, as he passes her on his way out.

“Why, are you offering?”

"God, no. I was just being polite. Go fall off a cliff, I couldn’t care less.”  
  
“I love you too,” Theon grins. “Robb gone yet?”

“No, I think he had to check something with Marketing.”

Since Asha’s messages are growing more numerous, in proportion to her mounting boredom as she waits for him in the hall, Theon decides to swing by the Marketing Department before he leaves. He’s side-tracked along the way by a burst of laughter from the coffee room. He knows that laughter. He can picture the broad grin, the sparkling blue eyes.

“I much preferred freestyle skiing but my parents wouldn’t let me compete, and anyways when I started off you didn’t have the kind of competitions you have now. Jon and I used to do a lot of backcountry skiing though – Jon probably still does – and as far as dangerous sports go... I mean, if my mother objected to me doing aerial skiing in the regulated context of a competition, I’ll let you imagine how she’d have reacted if she found out Jon and me skied down the south face of the Shadow Tower.”

“You didn’t!”

Theon steps inside the break room. Robb is leaning against a counter and Jeyne is sitting at the table with a mug of tea in her hands. They’re certainly not in a compromising position – their only point of contact is their feet, Robb’s leather shoe bumping against Jeyne’s fur-lined boots. Yet they both jump when Theon comes in, and try with little success to pretend that they’d been looking at anything but each other.

"I was on my way out," Theon says. "Unless there's something you want me to do?"

"No." Robb’s eyes are still crinkled with laughter. "Have a nice week-end, get some rest, you've earned it."

"Good job dealing with the Lannisters," Jeyne says, blushing slightly. It makes her look disgustingly adorable.

"Thanks," Theon replies, with a look of mock surprise. _Oh, are you talking to me?_

"See you Monday, then," Robb says. "Unless you want to grab a drink tomorrow night or such. You let me know."

"Yeah, sure," Theon replies, before he hightails it out of the break room.

That night he gets tremendously drunk, accompanied by an equally reckless Asha. They use each other as crutches to cross the perilous stretches from one bar to the next, staggering across gutters and sometimes straight into walls, slipping over wet stones and the stray patch of ice.

Theon's not prone to bouts of amnesia after a night of heavy drinking, but he'll still pretend that some of that evening never happened – like the half hour he spent rambling about Jeyne's glossy brown hair and why a rich chestnut colour was preferable to "pitch-black boredom, you know, you might as well be blind – you might as well be hair-blind, colour-blind, would you stop fucking laughing?!"

Other things he won't be able to sweep under the rug so easily, like the texts he exchanged with Jon at, his phone tells him, 2 in the morning.

Saturday morning is one long blur. Theon spends part of it throwing up and the rest complaining about how "I never get seasick, I was fucking born at sea are you kidding me!"

"You're not seasick. You're hungover. Shut up," Asha moans from his bed.

Theon does take a call from Petyr Baelish about a few missing details in Jon's interview, and then tries to call Jon about it, with his cheek pressed against the toilet lid and blue spots dancing in front of his eyes like maybe the pills the cute bartender gave him last night weren't just "You know, the usual stuff".

Jon doesn't answer, though he does call back sometime later. Ten or fifty minutes. It doesn't really make a difference, since Theon is still in the exact same position, having merely mustered the strength to clear his mouth with a few gargles of bottled water.

"What's up?" Jon shouts, above the roar of what could be the wind of a very noisy ski lift.

"Baelish," Theon croaks. "Has decided to torture me on a Saturday." He forces his voice a little, wincing at how it drives about a hundred daggers through his skull. "Says he didn't get your answer right. About... If you can manage to have a personal life in spite of the competitive sports, that kind of shit. Type me something. I'll pass it on."

"Theon, I'm out right now. I've got my coach waiting ten miles from here and if I don't manage this in record time he's gonna kill me. Make something up. I'm not wasting energy on this."

"And you think I should?" Theon groans, shutting his eyes in the hope it'll make the blue dots disappear. It doesn't. They become pink flecks.

"Call Baelish, do your thing, spin some convincing bullshit, knock back a pill for that headache and go to bed," Jon says. The authoritative tone carries well, despite the constant howling of the wind.

"Thanks for nothing, Snow."

Theon hangs up. He starts an email for Baelish and then gives up, his head hanging over the toilet bowl. His phone vibrates on the floor. Jon again.

Theon puts him on speaker so he won't have to pick up the phone.

"What?"

"I was thinking."

Jon no longer has to shout. Theon pictures him on a solitary track, surrounded by tall fir trees. Snow everywhere and Jon as a dark silhouette, cutting through a white landscape.

"About what?"

"Are you doing anything over the week-end? Apart from recuperating from your night out."

"I'm not working extra. I'll take care of that interview but... that's it," Theon mumbles.

"That's not what I meant."

Theon can hear the sound of Jon's skis, a regular two-timed rustle like a saw sliding over wood.

"You could come up here," Jon says.

"Come up here?"

"After the race, yeah. I should be done around two. I catch some sleep and we can hit the slopes tomorrow. Fly back in tomorrow night."

Theon stares at the phone. When he tears his eyes from the dark screen, he sees Asha standing wide-eyed in the doorway.

"Is that a no?" Jon asks, his tone annoyingly mild.

"What is this?" Theon asks, ignoring Asha who is trying to draw his attention with crude hand gestures. "We don't hang out. You and me, we don't hang out."

"Okay. Whatev-"  
  
"Don't you fucking whatever me, Snow. What the fuck are you doing."

"It doesn't have to be you," Jon says. "I've got friends doing the Torch too. I'll spend the week-end with them. Remember to write to Baelish."

He hangs up.

"What the fuck," Theon says, out loud.

"I was scrolling back up through your emails," Asha says gleefully. "The ones you sent me last year. Let me quote some of it to you."

"Oh, for fuck’s sake."

_"Snow is such an uptight prick you have no idea. We had to delay the launch of the website by three days because he didn't like the picture we'd picked for his bio. Before that it was the fucking font. 'Too dry.' How is that even an adjective you'd use to describe a font. I'll tell you what's too dry. His shrivelled up dick."_

"Asha," he groans.

"Two months later: _Snow showed up today. Sometimes he remembers he works here. Sometimes I do, too. Like when he walks in in the middle of a meeting with a dumb ski-tan and tailored jeans - I say tailored because there's no way he put them on, they had to sew the things onto his legs seeing how tight they are..."_

"Stop. My head hurts."

" _Pics of Snow and his gf in the news today. This town is such a godforsaken hole that Snow can pass for a celebrity. How did he even score such a firecracker when he can't sustain a 5mn conversation in the break room without everyone falling asleep..._ So what's his deal anyways? I thought he was straight."

"Nah," Theon mumbles. "He's dated a few guys up north. Never lasted past the competition season though. I guess he had energy to spend. Guys, girls. I don't think he gives a damn."

"So you're his competition season?"  
  
"What?"  
  
"Well, the season's starting, right? So you're his seasonal fling."  
  
"I'm nobody's fling and certainly not _Jon Snow's_."  
  
"I'll get over it, if you decide to fly up there," Asha says. "I'll even drive you to the airport."

"I'm not flying to bloody Winterfell," he snarls.


	7. Chapter 7

In spite of his hare-brained promises, when Theon gets his hands on Jon it'll be him taking what he wants, no matter what crazy new record Jon might have set in the meantime. He deserves as much for boarding a plane to bloody Winterfell with a head-splitting migraine.

Loath as he is to admit it, he'd missed the Stark homeland. The plane flies over a boundless landscape of shredded peaks, white and black and blue, and it feels a little like going home.

Even by Northern standards, Winterfell is a big town. It's only grown over the past decade, with the development of winter resorts and the creation of a second airport. Every day in the winter tourists flock from the South, drawn by the slopes or by the relentless spectacle of the seasonal competitions. Theon books a hotel – there'll be no staying at the family house. Robb's mother might take him in – might – but Jon and her don't get along.

He waits for the W1 bus at the coach station, with a hundred weird memories of doing the same thing with the Stark siblings over the years. Sansa had a pink ski suit that clashed with her bright red hair. Robb pretended not to notice how there were always three or four pairs of eyes on him, teenage girls giggling about his chiselled jaw and his woollen jumpers. And the younger ones, Arya and Bran and Rickon; they’d chase each other and nearly get run over by the coaches. Arya had a good aim with snowballs. Rickon would never stand still. Whenever they reached the slopes, Sansa and Theon would try to manoeuvre so they wouldn't have to sit between Arya and Rickon on the chairlifts.

On the coach, Theon balls up a sweater and gets the much-needed sleep he didn't manage to catch on the plane, with his hat pulled low over his eyes so the occasional streetlamp won't wake him up. The Torch Race should have started by now. He can't really be bothered to check, despite the sign above the driver's seat that reads _Occasional wi-fi._

Robb has done the race once or twice with Jon, though cross-country skiing has always been Jon's thing. "Boring as fuck," Theon would have said, two days ago, about the sport and about Jon. It might be that he's revising his judgement about Jon, but he's not about to do the same where the sport is concerned.

The Torch Race is an institution in the North. It follows the mountain range at some five thousand feet above the valley, and there's some legend to it, about the first people who crossed the range to settle on the other side. Presumably, they were carrying torches. There's another competition in the summer, also by night. Theon's never seen the appeal of either. By foot or with skis, it's a race through the equivalent of a dark windy tunnel. There are actual fire-lit torches at regular intervals, and the skiers wear headlamps, but it still seems pretty pointless.

Not that Theon is one to judge. Archery can't exactly be described as useful.

By the time he gets to Mole's Town, the settlement closest to the foothills of Castle Black, and despite his prolonged nap on the bus, he's had ample occasion to wonder what the fuck he's doing here. He holds on to the knowledge that he hasn't told Jon yet, and that should he wish to scamper, he'll be able to do so with his ego more or less intact.

The moment he jumps off the bus, this one comforting thought is dashed to pieces by the presence of a big red-bearded man at the bus stop. Theon barely has time to recognize Tormund – close friend of Jon’s, occasional graphic designer with debatable results – that he’s being dragged forward under a streetlamp by the collar of his coat so the man can have a better look at his face.

“I thought that was you, Greyjoy! What the fuck are you doing here? Is your boy competing again?”

Theon assumes Tormund means Robb.  
  
“No. It’s just... some PR shit.” _Great. Fanta-fucking-tastic_. Now whatever he decides to do, Jon will know about it. “What are you doing here?”  
  
“Oh, the King is doing the Torch this year.”

“Mance is skiing? I thought he’d retired.”

“Every year,” Tormund shrugs. “He’ll fall in a crevasse someday and that’ll be that. We did his skis so, if he wins it’ll be good for the brand and all. I don’t know, boy, you’re the PR genius. I’m mostly here to get drunk on company money. Tomorrow...Well, this morning, I guess,” Tormund corrects, checking his watch, “we might use the Baratheon chopper, get on top of Castle Black. If Mance and Jon are up for it. I’d offer but... We can’t afford to lug you if you get stuck, can we. It’s no walk in the park.”

“I have other things to do,” Theon says with a stilted smile. “You guys have fun breaking your necks, okay?”

Tormund drops a heavy hand on his shoulder.  
  
“Wait, we’re all going to the finish line, aren't we? We’ll drive you.”

Theon has a good enough idea of who the “we” stands for. It'll be a bunch of Jon’s fellow athletes and friends; an embarrassing situation waiting to happen as he sits squashed between sozzled men and women, in a car headed up a succession of hairpin bends .

“Nice of you, but I’ve got my own ride.”

He’d forgotten how cold it was up here. He’d forgotten the sounds the wind makes, that constant background noise that used to keep him awake at night, the first week or so that he spent at the Starks’, back when he was only a kid with two dead brothers and a father serving time for child endangerment.

 _It’s like nature is speaking to you,_ Robb’s mother told him, standing beside his bed after he’d gotten up for the fifth or sixth time under pretence of going to the bathroom. _The wind is watching over you. As long as you can hear it, you’ll be fine. It’s silence we should fear, not sound._

After a month or so, that midnight wind had begun to lull him to sleep.

The finish line of the Torch is a dazzling funfair or light and sound, with several huts offering food and drink to at least a hundred onlookers, drawn up here by the reputation of the race and by the free alcohol. Tourists flock up here every year. It’s not like there’s much else to do in Mole’s Town in the evenings, and there’s something about the mountainside dotted with the flickering lights of the torches that seduces the imagination.

Theon grabs a mug of punch and settles near the barriers, legs dangling from a picnic table as the crowd ripples around him. About ten minutes after he’s arrived, and as he begins to grow bored, he strikes up a conversation with the young couple sharing his table top, in the hope that it’ll keep Tormund and his gang away from him. They’re called Leo and Falia. The girl’s cousin is doing the Torch, it’s his first time attempting a 40-mile race and she’s worried he won’t see it through. They’re southerners, here for the week-end. All of their gear looks brand new, including their jackets and hats and the girl’s bright red mittens.

Theon steps effortlessly back into his usual pattern of charming people so well it might qualify as conning.

“And try that restaurant behind the main street – the Lockmaster? Or the Lockkeeper? Not the one with the red shutters. The other one. It’s less touristy and the owner will drown you in anecdotes. Her brother leads a rescue team and she’s heard all sorts of weird stories. If you’re going to ski, be sure to go before 9 or the lifts will be packed. Climb as high as you can and don’t come back all the way down.”

“Gosh, I’m so glad we met a local,” Falia exclaims. “Don’t you, Leo?”

“I’m not a local,” Theon corrects. “I just sort of grew up here, by accident.”

“Still! You know everything. You should totally join us for dinner tomorrow night?” She looks towards Leo as if she’s just realized she should maybe have asked him, before inviting some guy to crash their romantic getaway.

“Yeah, yeah, you totally should,” Leo smiles.

Theon’s met many guys like him among Robb’s friends. Jock types. Easy-going, environment-friendly, not much under the surface; the tenacity of a mule. Not the kind you’d have a lengthy conversation with.

“I’ll probably be gone by then,” he says.

He considers giving them his number and hijacking their ski outing the next day. Make the most of his week-end up here, if Jon’s going to throw himself off the side of Castle Black. But it’ll be easier and much less trouble to just fly back.

“Here’s the first ones!” Leo exclaims.

Theon jumps down from the table and elbows his way through the crowd, stepping on crushed paper cups. Everything is lit orange by the overhead spotlights. There’s a guy screaming in a microphone, but his voice is drowned out by the music coming from a bandstand on the other side of the track. Everyone looks far too alive for such an early hour.

“If you wanna see the podium, I suggest you head back and through the big doors over there, before it gets packed,” some old guy tells Theon as the crowd pushes them against one another.

“I don’t care about the podium,” Theon informs him.

“Me neither,” the old man says. “My niece is competing but I’ll just be happy if she finishes before sunrise. I’ve gotta be in Winterfell by 10. My granddaughter has an ice-skating competition.”

Theon has a sudden sympathetic thought for Catelyn Stark, who’d run from one event to the next in very much the same way when her children started doing competitive sports.

“Good luck with that,” he calls back, and heads off towards the large barn where they’ve set up the podium.

A cursory look at his phone reveals that he doesn’t have any signal, though a message from Robb came in at some point, several hours earlier.

He slips the phone back in his pocket.

Unsurprisingly, Mance “the King” Rayder and Jon have both made the podium. Mance won, which must be something of a blow to Jon’s ego after his streak of four or five consecutive wins.

Theon considers staying at the back, hugging the walls with another glass of punch, but that’s never really been his modus operandi. So he elbows his way to the front once again and reaches over a barrier to touch Jon’s elbow. Jon is wearing one of these ridiculous suits that no one will ever look good in. He looks like he hasn’t slept in a decade, but when he turns around and finds Theon behind him, he cracks an unexpected smile.

“I’ll be damned."

“I have it on good authority that you will,” Theon snorts. “Second place, Snow, seriously?”

Jon’s face actually falls for a second, and it’s all Theon can do not to reach out again, pull him back towards the barrier. Heckling Jon is fair game, always has been and always will be, but if someone had said a similar thing to him when he first lost a competition to Ramsay Bolton, he’d have used his bow string to strangle them.

“I didn’t mean it, you know I didn’t mean it,” he babbles.

“I have to go change,” Jon says, balling up the medal and its ribbon in his fist.

He’s a few feet away when he tosses it back above his shoulder. Theon catches it, without thinking. The metal is still warm from Jon’s skin.

When Theon was nineteen, Jon once had to pick him up from the club. It was after an event of some sort, maybe a “friendly” competition between Roose Bolton’s Northern Archery Club and the Umbers’ Great Northern Archery Club. Not that it matters. Most of the day has vanished from Theon's memory, apart from the part where Jon had to come and get him.

A week before that, Theon and Robb had stayed out drinking, and they’d crashed Ned Stark’s car. This wasn't one of Theon’s proudest moments. Robb’s dad had a way of looking at you like you’d not only let him down but also the whole Stark pantheon, ten or fifty generations of fearsome, hard-working men. The bottom line was that Ned and Cat had confiscated Theon’s car, and he’d gone along with it, nineteen or not, because he couldn’t afford to piss them off any further.

So Jon had to pick him up. There must have been a girl – there often was, in those days – but maybe Theon and her were on the outs at that point. Jon showed up in a thing that did not deserve to be called a car. Theon had thrown his stuff on the back seat and somehow he’d folded his long legs in the small space up front and off they went.

It was one of the longest car rides of his life. He needed a ride to town that evening – he can’t remember what that was about, either, a party maybe – and everything relied upon him not antagonizing Jon during the thirty miles that lay between the club and the Stark house.

To his credit, he held out for at least two thirds of the way before nature caught up with him. Match, meet the oil spill.

He didn’t make it to the party. Hell, he didn’t even make it home. Jon braked so hard Theon’s seatbelt left a red imprint on his collarbone that took a week to fade. Then he got out and waited patiently for Theon to get out as well. They fought on the narrow strip of tarmac off the side of the road, and if Theon had thought he’d have to hold back his punches, he soon found out he wouldn’t be able to, and that sixteen year-old Jon could more than hold his own.

He can’t remember what he’d said. Something about Jon’s absentee father? Or about his lack of a girlfriend, or about the way he followed Robb everywhere.

Theon punched Jon in the mouth and Jon spat the blood in his face before head-butting him so hard he passed out.

When he came to, four minutes later, Jon was gone. Theon would only learn later that Jon had run down the road to the nearest house to call for help. As it was, he saw Jon’s locked car and the falling snow and with the impaired judgment of the mildly concussed, he walked off towards the forest and took a shortcut home through the woods.

The incident freaked Ned and Cat enough that Robb and Theon were promptly allowed to use their cars again. Theon and Jon avoided each other for weeks. And eventually, things returned to normal – indifference and the occasional taunt, rather than Jon precipitously walking out of a room if Theon was in it. They never discussed the incident again, but after that Jon slowly gained a reputation for being the guy who broke up fights, rather than the one who initiated them.

Theon steps outside of the barn and lights a cigarette. Maybe he should just run to board the next shuttle before it leaves. It would spare him having to decline going back with Jon and Tormund and all of their insufferably good-natured friends. He probably has time to finish his cigarette first; Jon won’t be out for a while.

So he smokes with one gloved hand holding the cigarette and the other un-gloved in his pocket, wrapped around Jon’s silver medal.

“Let’s go,” Jon says, thoroughly startling him. He steals Theon’s cigarette and walks off towards the shuttle, his ski bag slung over his back.

“You’re not driving back with Tormund?”

Jon looks back at Theon like he’s just said something incredibly stupid.

“I had you fly out here and climb up the mountain at two in the morning. And you thought that... God, I’m too tired for this shit. Get on.”

The shuttle is packed and it’s an uncomfortable ride back, squashed between families of tourists and Jon’s competitors, and everyone smells like sweat and punch and Theon is starting to see stars, because it’s been a long week and him and Asha didn’t exactly get home early the night before. Jon doesn’t look any better. There’s a distinct probability that it’s only his irritation keeping him up. This isn’t going the way Theon had planned.

Not that he had really planned anything. In fact, if he’d taken only a minute to think, actually think, he’d have realized what a terrible idea this all was. And there’s still a long bus ride to go before they’re back in Winterfell.

Jon must have thought the same, because from the moment they’re off the shuttle and standing in the cold, he says, “Let’s try the hotel here.”

"It'll be packed,” Theon warns him, picking up the skis and Jon’s backpack and slinging both bags other his shoulder. “They must have, what, ten rooms?”

“Give me the fucking medal,” Jon says.

The fucking medal does get them a room. Theon wonders whether they had to kick someone out or if they keep a room for emergencies (of the ‘to the victor the spoils’ variety). Then he decides he’s too tired to care.

The room is on the top floor of the hotel, right under the sloping roof and with a balcony that opens onto the dark void of Mole’s Town and above that, on the rocky battlements of Castle Black under the starry night sky.

That’s yet another thing that Theon had forgotten, how cheap beauty can be in these parts. You look up and there it is, the world expanding above you into menacing towers of rock and thousands of glittering stars.

He’s not from the North, but God, did he use to regret it. Nearly every day that he spent here, from his tenth birthday to his twentieth. There wasn’t a thing he believed in and yet he’d prayed and prayed. Make me a true Northerner. Less of an islander. Less of a false-hearted crook. I want to be rocks and pines, bear claws and wolf jaws. Like the Starks.

He steps back from the balcony. Judging from the noise, Jon’s under the shower.

Throwing himself down on the bed, Theon lazily checks his phone – dead battery, the charger’s in Winterfell along with just about everything he’s brought along, save his wallet. He leans over the edge of the bed, snags Jon’s bag by one of the straps and rummages in it for a charger. He does come up against Jon’s phone, but he’s careful not to turn it on, just like he’ll be careful not to check his own for as long as he can manage. If he can get a few hours of peace, he’ll take them.

Once he’s plugged in the phone, he lies back down on the bed. When Jon comes out, he’ll either be fast asleep, or pretending to be.

He wakes up a few hours later, for no reason that he can fathom. He returns to the balcony.

Turns out he was wrong and he does have another belonging at hand besides the wallet – his pack of cigarettes. As he closes the door, he looks back to where Jon is sleeping, facing obstinately in the other direction. All Theon can see is his muscled back and the dark hair upon the pillow.

He lights a cigarette and turns towards the valley, trying to drag up whatever lesson his father and uncles gave him about the stars, way back when. If he knew how to read them, he’d know where to look for Winterfell. Though if he can’t set himself a course by the stars, he can probably use the mountains. Some teacher in middle school had punished him once for not being able to name them in the right order.

So he does it now, mostly out of spite. T _he Shadow Tower, the Sentinel, the Greyguard, the Stonedoor. Hoarfrost Hill, Icemark, the Nightfort, Deep Lake Mountain. The Queensgate, Castle Black, Mount Oakenshield, the Woodswatch. The Sable Peaks, Long Barrow Mountain, the Torches, the Greenguard and Eastwatch._

He’s missing one. He’s always missing one. _The Woodswatch? No. I’ve got the two guards, grey and green. I have the fort and the gate and the two hills... Ah. Rimegate Hill._

He finishes the cigarette and lights another one, considering his options. He could just leave, take a bus to Winterfell. There’s an all-night service on the night of the Torch Race. He’d pick up his stuff and get a taxi to the airport. Spend the remainder of his Sunday sleeping.

He watches one bus depart from the small square in front of the hotel, and then a second. He lights another cigarette. Far upon the horizon, the sky has begun to lighten. Theon allows himself one disagreeable question.

_Is this about Robb?_

The door closes behind him. Jon’s thrown on jeans and a fleece; he doesn’t look particularly well-rested.

Theon hands him the cigarette.

Jon takes it but he doesn’t immediately bring it to his lips; instead he puts his hand on Theon’s neck and kisses him, fleetingly, on the mouth. Like he’s doing it in passing, like he might have said, ‘good morning’.

 _No,_ Theon decides, as he seizes a handful of Jon’s fleece and pulls him against his chest, holding his face in both hands to get better access to his mouth. He deals him one exploratory kiss after another, and thinks, _It’s not about Robb, and it would be so much easier if it was._

Jon is a good kisser. With this as with everything else, he doesn’t do things by half. Theon kisses him until his lips are sore and he can’t feel his face for the cold, until he’s developed a possibly incurable addiction to Jon’s silky hair and to the way Jon keeps rubbing his hardening dick against his thigh.

“I still won, technically,” Jon tells him, when they finally break apart. “I get to fuck you.”

“I took a plane to Winterfell with a bloody hangover,” Theon argues. “I get to decide.”

“Okay. Decide.”

“Yeah, sure.” Theon slides a hand under the collar of Jon’s fleece, stroking the warm skin beneath. “Though I think the terms were, I’ll let you bend me over a desk. Is there a desk in here?”

“We’re not doing this now,” Jon says. “Not if we’re going skiing in an hour. I’ve asked Tormund to pick up our gear from Winterfell and to drop it off at the front desk on his way to Hoarfrost.”

“What do you mean, pick up our gear? How did he know where to get mine?”

“Not from your hotel. From the Starks’.”

“You mean he’s going to wake up Catelyn at 4 in the morning to pick up our old skis? Man, she’s gonna be pleased.”

“She’s not around." In turn Jon leans against the railing, hands in the pockets of his fleece. “She’s never around for the Torch, unless Robb’s doing it. She’s visiting her sister.”

“She left... on purpose?”

“Yeah, so I can use the house.”

The Starks have a big house. It comes as a consequence of having raised seven children – five Starks, one Snow, one Greyjoy. There’s little doubt the eight bedrooms could have fit both Jon and Catelyn and whomever else is currently in Winterfell, maybe the two younger boys.

It sounds like something Catelyn would do, though. Desert the house so she wouldn’t feel obligated to attend Jon’s race.

“I’m sorry,” Theon says.

“That’s fine, I’m used to it,” Jon replies, though his sullen face says otherwise. “And you came, so. That’s something.”

“How the mighty have fallen,” Theon snorts. “That you’d have to rely on me to cheer you on.”

“I’ll take what I can get,” Jon smiles.

If they’d been in another place – in the offices of Stark & Snow or even just inside the room, without the stunning backdrop of stars and snow and mountain slopes, Theon might have said something cutting. _Don’t go soft on me, Snow. Do you realize how exposed you are right now?_

“Come here,” he says, because the setting invites another approach.

“What are you doing,” Jon mutters, as Theon pushes him again the railing and presses himself against his back, hands working on the fastening of his jeans.

“Giving you good memories. Warming you up. Enjoy the view.”

Jon mumbles something incoherent. He reaches down to cover Theon's hand and press it more firmly against his cock. Theon jerks him off with sharp, determined thrusts. Jon's hair keeps getting in his face and he keeps spitting it out, and he kisses all the exposed skin he can find, Jon's ear and his neck and his collarbone.

He's always been good at measuring reactions, anything that'll help him reduce the person in front of him to a shaking, begging mess. It's a good thing because Jon isn't being particularly vocal about what he wants. He grunts his approval and when Theon finds a sensitive spot at the base of his neck he reaches back and tugs at his hair, but for the most part he's silent, far more silent than that first time in his office.

Eventually it starts to feel like a tug-of-war, like Jon's testing him, to see how long Theon will last before snapping and spilling a torrent of profanities right against his ear. Theon holds out longer than he would have thought, though he does caves in the end, as Jon must have known he would. From the moment Theon starts speaking a tremor rakes him from his lower back to his shoulders – a suppressed fit of laughter.

"If you prefer them silent, you picked the wrong guy," Theon tells him, giving his dick a mean-spirited squeeze that has Jon jolt against him, in pain this time. "Why do we always have models marching off towards the horizon with... skis on their shoulders, for our campaigns? Fuck why did no one ever think of this before. I'd sell it. Just a shot of your upper body above the railing with your breath coming out white. With your eyes shut, mouth open. Hand down the front of your trousers, out of the frame. Enjoy the outdoors, it'd go. Mention in the lower right corner, Jon Snow, competitive skier."

"What the fuck... what the fuck do you expect to sell with that?" Jon asks, as Theon grinds shamelessly against his ass.

"Everything. That fleece you're wearing. Your underwear. The outdoors as a concept. Sex as a public display. Fuck. I'd pay good money to fuck you in public. Did you ever do it in a gondola? Right up against the window, facing down. You've got to... you’ve got to make eye contact with those in the cabin under. Heightens the... heightens the experience. And here they might even... they'd probably recognize you. Jon Snow, darling of the Northern Wall Range. I'd put that on the posters too." He begins to move his hand faster, lifting his knee onto the railing so he'll get better friction, dragging his dick along the swell of Jon's arse. Even with their clothes on it's good. It's better than good. "And you'd let me, wouldn't you? You'd let me do it."

It's only when Jon answers that Theon grasps the enormity of that question. How much he had riding on it.

"Yeah," Jon says, his grip painfully tight on Theon's hand. "I would."

Theon shuts his eyes and refuses to focus on his sudden dizziness – it's always been a turn-on for him, after all, the corruption of the outwardly incorruptible, and it shouldn't mean anything more that this incorruptible force is Jon, Jon with his disconcerting softness and his brittle pride.

"I used to... I used to wonder," Jon mumbles, "what it was like. To be one of the girls you..."

Theon bends him over the railing, fists a hand in his hair and whispers, hot against his ear, "That's what it's like. I hold them down. I tell them what they want to hear. You're a damn prize, Jon Snow. I spent years trying not to admire you and I swear it takes some fucking effort. Screw Mance. Screw the others. You've got me... on... my... fucking... knees."

Jon's body tenses against him and his cock pulses between Theon's fingers, warmth gathering inside his palm. He quickly unfastens his pants and grasping Jon's still-shaking hand, he pushes it between his legs.

"What do you want me to..."

Jon doesn't get to say another word. The moment he touches Theon’s cock, Theon spills over his hand with a whispered "Fuck."

Jon collapses against the railing and lets out an exhausted laugh. "Really? That was fast."

"You said we had an hour, didn't you?" Theon says. "Well, we're right on time. Wash your hands and we can go."

Jon laughs again. It's a rough rumble of sound, and it keeps catching Theon off-guard. He'd trap it in his hands if he could, like you might slam a glass down over an insect. Watch it scurry in the light, release it through the window.

He goes in to wash his hands and grab an extra layer. When he comes back outside Jon hasn't moved, elbows on the railing and with his eyes on the mountains ahead. The sky is now a paler grey, lined with blue along the mountaintops.

"I'd date you," Jon says, without looking back.  
  
Theon freezes, his hands still wrapped around the sweater he'd been pulling over his chest. "What-"

"Don't what the fuck me," Jon says, with some lassitude. "I'm not used to your games and I don't mind giving them a try, but I'm never going to just... use someone. That's not me. What's been going on the last few days..." He turns around and makes a gesture so vague it might as well have encompassed himself and Theon and the whole mountain range. "... you, me, this thing..."

"Most people would call it fucking," Theon cuts in drily, as he finishes adjusting his sweater and takes a step forward, retrieving his cigarettes from the railing.

"I wouldn't. That doesn't exactly cover it. Not anymore."

"Since when?" Theon asks, raising his eyebrows.

He can't quite see Jon's face, not much of it at any rate, just the dark shadow along his unshaven cheeks and upper lip, the serious set of his mouth, and a black void where his eyes would be. He can tell he's being looked at, though, and it makes him fidgety. He pulls out a cigarette.

He expects Jon to say, "Since you came here".

What he does say is, "When I came to your office, on Friday."

Theon tries to remember what happened then. He'd just been back from that nightmarish luncheon and his tryst with Robb. Jon had come in phone in hand and apologized because he needed to handle something, an order gone wrong. And then as if he needed no other transition, he’d set the phone down. He’d pushed Theon's legs apart with his knee and he’d knelt on the hard floor.

"You had an illumination while you sucked my dick?"

Jon sighs. This, at least, is familiar: Jon being annoyed with him.

"You were worried about the race," Jon says. "You remembered the Torch Race three years ago."

"Of course I was fucking worried," Theon says, flustered, as he attempts to get his lighter to work. "We all had a bad year that year. With Robb's accident and mine... It’s still looming over us."

"Theon."

Jon wipes his hands on the snow-covered railing before he takes the lighter and cigarette from him. He lights the cigarette, slips the lighter inside Theon's pocket and holds the cigarette against Theon's lips.

Theon reflects, slightly worried, that up until now he could at least pretend that he was in control of the situation.

"I don't date. You know I don't fucking date. What do you want from me? You think I'll hold your hand at office parties? Come and cheer for you at your races?"

"You just did that," Jon murmurs, low enough that Theon can't tell if he's being mocked or not.

"Bloody hell, Snow. That's not us. I mean of course it's you. You're probably elected boyfriend of the year every year, no matter that it's rarely ever the same person you're dating. But you can't just..."

"Believe me, I do measure the challenge. It's like deciding to tame a bear... something less tameable than a bear. A shark. I'm just saying I'd do it."

"You'd do it," Theon repeats, disbelievingly. "You'd _tame_ me."  
  
"No. I'd date you," Jon says with infinite patience. "To speak your language, if I get to fuck you on a regular basis, I want the world to know."

"Well, the world can't know," Theon grumbles, taking a hasty drag of the cigarette.

"You mean Robb."

"I do, actually," Theon snaps. "I do mean Robb. Robb told me to stay away from you."

"Right."

Jon drums his fingers against the railing. He's biting his lip, which Theon considers a vile trick to use at such a turning point in their conversation.

"Because of me, or because of you?" Jon asks.  
  
"What?"  
  
"Is Robb against it because of me, or because of you?"  
  
"Us both!" Theon exclaims. "... Mainly me," he corrects.  
  
"If it's that he thinks you'll hurt me or something like that... I can talk to him."

"Fuck, please don't."

"He doesn't get to make my decisions for me," Jon protests. "But if it's that he fears he'll lose us both... Then I get the need for discretion, I guess. You're his best friend. I get that it would be weird, even for someone who isn't possessive like Robb can be."

Theon realizes with absolute stunned clarity that Jon doesn't have the faintest clue about the true nature of his relationship with Robb. Whatever it might be called. A friendship with benefits. A formerly thrilling fuckfest that took a turn for the unhealthy. Simultaneously, he realizes he shouldn't be surprised. This is Jon he's talking about. Jon's seen Robb drunk with his head in Theon's lap or his hand rubbing the front of Theon's pants, and where anyone else would have assumed that there was _something_ going on, Jon must have thought Robb was acting out because of his derailed career, and that Theon was being a good friend.

He considers telling Jon. For a second he's on the cusp of doing so.

_Robb and I have been fucking for years. I know every inch of his body, I know how to do it so it won't hurt him, I know how to make him say that I'm the best fucking thing that's ever happened to him._

He bites down hard on the cigarette and he keeps his fucking mouth shut.

"Is Robb the reason, then?" Jon asks.

"Not the only reason," Theon says. "Are we done here?" He crushes the cigarette on the railing. "You said we'd ski. Let's go ski."


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (my laptop died on me, so until I get a new one reformatting these chapters & reposting them is going to be... complicated. apologies for the terrible quality of the pictures.)

They do find their gear waiting at the front desk.

"How did he know which one was mine?" Theon asks.

It seems like a legitimate question, given how many Starks have left skis and windbreakers and snow boots and snowboards lying around the house.

"I told him," Jon says, like he’s surprised Theon even needs to ask.

The patronizing look is unwarranted in Theon's opinion, because he had no way of guessing that Jon would have remembered the colour of his parka or the size of his boots.

They take a bus to the foothills of the Greyguard. There’s a chairlift that climbs about a third of the way up the mountain, and then to climb higher and stay within the boundaries of the resort, you have to go take another lift that veers off towards the Stonedoor. Jon and Theon take the first lift, queuing behind a bunch of loud teenagers. One of the girls gets stuck through the ticket barrier and Theon helps her out with a reflexive smile. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Jon roll his eyes.

“I tried to come with Arya a couple weeks ago,” Jon says, as the lift takes them up the mountainside, over forests and white ski slopes covered with crisscrossing tracks. “But there wasn’t enough snow. We got to the top of the Stonedoor and had a drink at the restaurant there, and then we took the lift down.”

“Arya’s a damn good skier,” Theon says. He hasn’t seen her in a while, but there are videos. She doesn’t ski professionally, but she’s found a crowd that’ll let her do what she likes more or less for free, with sponsors who’re more than happy to feature her stunts in sports mags. She’s into the kind of stuff that Robb used to love, crazy acrobatics, freesking and the like. Rickon, the youngest of the Stark bunch, seems set to follow in their footsteps. As a rule, the other Starks are more cautious.

Hell, even Arya’s more cautious these days. It doesn’t matter that Robb hurt himself doing regular skiing on a regular slope. It’s still enough of a warning that they’ll all think twice before risking their lives, now.

They’ll think twice about it and then they’ll do it anyways.

“You couldn’t get a lift at five in the morning here before,” Theon remarks, as the loud group of teens disembarks ahead of them.

“You still can’t, officially. My coach knows the guy, and I told him I’d go up the Stonedoor this morning, try to improve my downhill timing. Somehow,” he notes, as he lifts the barrier ahead of their arrival, “the kids always know.”

Theon slides away from the lift and looks back at him with a quizzical expression.

“We used to be the same, remember?” Jon says. “When some champion came to train, we knew it. Robb would come down at four in the morning like he’d been warned in a dream of something. ‘The lifts are on, the lifts are on.’ And then we’d go. Sometimes you came along.” He’s looking at the group of teens, who are chattering excitedly on their way to the next lift.

“I remember,” Theon says. "I was always worried I wouldn't be able to keep up."

"That's stupid," Jon tells him, matter-of-factly. "You always kept up. You're good at this," he goes on, lifting his skis onto his shoulder, "which is unfair, because you already had that whole archery thing going, and people shouldn't be allowed to be good at everything."

"That's hardly everything," Theon snorts.

He follows Jon as he walks off towards the forest, in the opposite direction to the teens and the Stonedoor lift.

"Won't your coach be pissed?"

"About what?"

"That you lied to him. About going to train on the Stonedoor."

"Oh, he's used to it," Jon calls back. "I do this every year. It's code for ‘I'm taking someone up the mountain.’ He calls it my after-Torch snack." Jon turns back, his face in the shadow of the approaching forest. "I'm not okay with that, by the way. It's rude and it isn't true. It's not about riding off the high of the race, or whatever Thorne thinks..."

"You don't have to tell me that," Theon answers, stopping in turn to look up at him. "I'm fine being your after-Torch snack."

Jon seems like he wants to say something, but in the end he just sighs exaggeratedly and resumes walking.

They don't talk much as they climb. Jon is silent by nature and Theon's trying to hide how demanding he's finding the ascent, after a string of nights where he's hardly gotten his fill of sleep and all the weeks he’s spent at the office. But the landscape does sort of make up for it. Every time he stops and looks back, the lift has receded further into the distance and the sun has risen higher, and the whole mountain range is slowly coming into focus, glaciers and forests and snowy slopes. He can even see Winterfell further south, with another range to the west of it, not quite as high as this one. Beyond that it’s the Wolfswood – acres and acres of dark forest, the largest south of the Northern Wall Range.

"Hey!"

Theon turns back in time to see Jon's lifted phone, but not fast enough that he can avoid being in the picture.

"What the fuck!"

"It would have been a waste of a good setting," Jon says. "Don't get your knickers in a twist. I won't put it up on social media."

"Like that's the issue," Theon grumbles.

He waits patiently for a chance to strike back. It comes when they reach the top of the final plateau before the summit. They won't be able to climb to the top, not while they're carrying their skis and without any climbing gear, so they take a moment to rest on the plateau and enjoy the view before going down. By now the sun is high in the sky and the north stretches out before them, shining in the light.

"Worth all the trouble?" Jon asks, pushing his goggles up over his forehead.

Theon shoves him down, whips his phone out and takes a picture, just as Jon's raising his head and spitting snow. Then he drops down before Jon can get a chance to get up, straddling his hips.

He kisses him with the wind at his back and a foolish burst of laughter clawing at his chest, threatening to spill from his mouth and into Jon's. Jon kisses him back only long enough to pull the hat off his head and shove a fistful of snow down his collar. They roll over in the fresh snow in a flurry of erratic fisticuffs, until Theon has to beg for a reprieve; his mouth full of snow, his glasses tangled around his neck.

"I yield, I yield!"

The moment Jon makes to sit back Theon captures him in a headlock with a manic laugh.

"Oh my god," Jon mumbles, his face squashed against Theon's chest. "You're worse than Rickon."

Theon lets him go and they collapse side by side in the snow, looking at the looming point of the Greyguard above them and at the great blue sky.

Theon tries to think of the last time he's felt this good. Tired and ecstatic, stupid enough with joy that he feels a kinship with everything around him, including the cold and the moaning wind. He doesn't have to think for long. It was a few hours ago, when Jon kissed him on that balcony. Turning his head slightly, he finds Jon looking at him, dark eyes slanted against the sun, his beard and hair white with snow. Leaning sideways in the snow, Theon cranes his neck so he can reach his mouth. Jon meets him halfway.

"Let's go," Theon says after a while, when the cold starts to seep through his wet clothes.

Jon nods. He chucks another handful of snow at Theon's face for good measure, leaving him spluttering as he goes to retrieve his skis.

Theon follows Jon to the edge of the plateau and they stand side by side above the wide, unmarked slope.

"Regretting all these cigarettes, Greyjoy?"

Theon flips him off. He adjusts his goggles and neckband.

"After you," he says.

Now that he's here, he's anxious to go down. He's always loved backcountry skiing. The exhilaration of it, the landscapes. The solitude, above all else. And he's not arrogant enough to dismiss how much of a privilege it is to go off-piste with Jon Snow. It's the closest thing to knowing for certain you'll get to the bottom of the mountain in one piece.

Yet he waits a moment before launching himself into the void, because Jon has taken off and it's beautiful to watch. Theon used to make fun of Jon for being the less adventurous Stark – Sansa aside, but Sansa had never quite taken to skiing as much as her siblings did. In any case, next to Robb and Arya's acrobatics, Jon's backcountry skiing seemed tedious.

But goddammit, the guy is fast. He's got an unerring instinct about where to turn, how far off from the relatively safe middle of the slope. His skis leave long sweeping curves in the fresh powder.

Theon has barely had time to get used to the idea of Jon being a damn fucking sight that Jon is nearly at the end of the slope, taking one last turn in a cloud of snow.

Theon does follow him then, leaning forward on his knees and pushing off.

He'd forgotten. He'd bloody forgotten. The texture of the untouched snow, the gathering speed, the blur of the passing trees on either side. When he looks up, the wide open space makes it seem like he'd just have to take a wider turn at the next bend and he could take off into the cold morning light, flying above valleys and lakes and the frosted tops of the pines, all the way to Winterfell.

He's smiling so much he worries the wind might shatter his teeth.

When he skids to a stop beside Jon he doesn't let him get more than a word out. That word is "you" and it rings in the clear air even as Theon mashes their mouths together, seizing two fistfuls of Jon's jacket and hauling him forwards despite their skis and sticks and sunglasses.

Jon makes a surprised but unequivocally happy sound.

"It's good snow," he says, like he's providing an explanation.

"Yes, Snow, it's good snow," Theon says, and sniggers.

"You're a fucking five year old," Jon informs him.

He grabs his sticks and pushes off again. Again, Theon follows. They skirt along the edge of the forest and he goes a little crazy this time, swerving away from Jon and leaving his own tracks.

Jon overtakes him two or three turns later, in a blur of black and blue. Theon promptly cuts through Jon's tracks and sweeps past him with a whooping cry. He's rewarded for his theatrics when Jon flies by again, with a grin and his middle finger raised in salute.

It's over before Theon knows it. The forest gives way to the uneven plateau and the humming machinery at the top of the chairlift. There are skiers everywhere now, disembarking from the lift and sliding toward the next one, or preparing to go down toward the valley.

"Beer?" Jon calls.

They head for the Stonedoor lift, getting in line behind dozens of other skiers. Already Theon misses the quiet of the plateau beneath the Greyguard summit. Here it's families and friends and demonstrative couples. It takes some readjustment.

“Hey! Hey, guys!”

It’s not until the guy plants himself right before them that Theon understands they’re being spoken to. He must be seventeen, eighteen at most, with an elaborate mess of spiky hair and reflective goggles, bright blue.

“Hi, we were in front of you in the lift this morning, I don’t know if you remember…”

“Yeah, we remember,” Jon says, with that Jon-level of neutrality that could mean anything from “you were in front of us in the lift” to “you were extremely loud and I’d rather you stayed out of range of my eardrums.”

“We saw you, or Denys thought he saw you, up there?” the boy says, pointing at the side of the Greyguard, high above the forest. “That was you, right? Because that was impressive, man. So we were wondering if you’d have a drink with us? We've never gone out-of-area, except Hub, but it was really supervised, like. So we thought, maybe you could talk to us.”

Jon glances at Theon. Theon shrugs. He can see the group of teens further up the line, looking back at them and whispering to each other. The girl he’d helped through the barrier is among them. When she sees him looking she gives him a timid smile.

“Yeah, man, sure, whatever,” Theon says. “We were going for beers anyways.”

“It’s on us,” the guy says, grinning. “Oh, I’m Bael, by the way.”

“Theon. That here’s Jon Snow.”

“Snow, really?” Bael says. “It was fate, then. You and skiing. Well, we’ll meet you guys at the restaurant up there, okay?”

“Do you have a death wish?” Jon asks Theon as they watch Bael climb back towards his friends. One of the boys actually high-fives him.

“It’ll be good for you,” Theon tells him. “He was completely star struck. They’ll eat up everything you say, you’ll see. They might even take notes. You’ll feel adored and whatever.”

“Adored and whatever,” Jon repeats, shaking his head with a dubious smile.

The restaurant is crowded and noisy, with the customers spilling out through the open doors and onto the terrace. By now it’s suitably warm and they settle outside, once they’ve found three chairs and a few crates and casks that they can upturn. Theon takes a backseat, sipping his beer and smoking and letting the teenagers ask Jon whatever questions they can come up with. After the first few minutes Jon begins to relax and to give more than monosyllabic answers. As Theon had expected, Bael and Denys and the rest of the crew lap up his words like they’re the finest vintage.

“I’ll grab us another round,” he says, getting up. “Who wants what?”

“I’ll come help.”

It’s the girl from this morning. Willow, her name is. Tall and blonde with a long face and hazel eyes. She’s spent the past ten minutes trying to work up the courage to talk to him as he pretended not to notice, smirking around his cigarette.

“Are you here for the week-end?” she asks, as they re-enter the restaurant.

“Yeah. We’re headed back to Cerwyn tonight. Or at least, I am. And you guys?”

“King’s,” she says. “We have a plane tomorrow morning.”

She disappears to the bathroom as he’s ordering the drinks, and he’s waiting for her to come back, drumming his fingers on the edge of a tray full of glasses, when he hears someone call his name. He recognizes the girl straight away – she’s got one of these faces you don’t forget, with cat eyes that stand out against her dark skin, green and luminous. The red mittens he’d noticed last night are dangling from her shoulder. It takes him another second before he remembers her name.

“Falia?”

“Yes! How are you?”

They exchange pleasantries. She speaks about her cousin, who finished the Torch in two hours and a half, which isn’t bad, for a first time.

“And the people you were waiting for last night? Did they finish okay?”

“Oh, he did,” Theon says, waving a dismissive hand. “He placed second.”

“What? Oh my god, that’s amazing!”

“Yeah, that’s Jon for you.”

Willow has reappeared silent at his elbow, so he lifts the tray and heads back for the terrace, Falia in tow.

“Is your friend around?” she asks.

They stop on the threshold, waiting for a big guy to move out of the way. Willow lifts two glasses from the tray and heads back towards their group. Theon gives a vague nod in that direction.

“Yeah, it’s the guy in the blue jacket over there. With the crowd of high-schoolers.”

Falia laughs. “I see. It must have its perks. When it comes to getting free drinks and meeting girls and that kind of thing. Do you get to profit from it?”

“I’m a decent skier myself,” Theon says, a little miffed. “And I don’t need Jon to score girls for me. Actually, he might be good at skiing, but flirting isn’t his forte.”

“I was having you on,” Falia snorts, elbowing him in the ribs. The drinks rattle. “Don’t worry, the girls will come to him, no matter how bad he is at flirting. He’s really cute.”

“That’s not an issue,” Theon says. He doesn’t give himself time to think before he adds, “he’s taken.” He looks at her insistently until she catches on. Her smile widens.

“Lucky him, lucky you,” she says. “Hey, if you change your mind about tonight, you could still have dinner with Leo and me. The two of you. In that restaurant you told us about?”

Theon figures they could take a plane early the next morning. They’ll come in late at the office, but it’s not like anyone will tell Jon anything, and he can handle Robb. It feels like playing with matches – it feels like his kind of game.

As the kids pass the drinks around, getting the orders mixed up, he takes the opportunity to lean towards Jon and whisper, “We’re having dinner with this couple I met last night.”

“We can’t,” Jon says. “Work.”

“Yeah, we’ll just fly back tomorrow. Whatever. Oh, and I told them you were my boyfriend. Just a heads up.”

Jon turns so fast Theon’s surprised he doesn’t get whiplash.

“What?”

“I’m so proud of you, babe,” Theon says, straight-faced. “The way you nearly won that race. It got me all hot and bothered.”

“Asshole,” Jon mutters, and turns back towards Denys and his question about fixations.

Theon laughs. He pats Jon’s shoulder and reaches down for his beer.

He’d left his phone next to the ashtray, and he can see that the screen has lit up, so he picks that up instead.


	9. Chapter 9

Jon falls asleep in one of the deckchairs on the terrace. When the sun begins to beat down on them, Willow lathers his face and neck with sunscreen.

Theon skis down the Stonedoor slope a few times with the group and when he returns two hours later, Jon hasn’t moved. Willow’s picked up a book and is reading in the adjoining deckchair, watching over their things. Theon runs into Falia and Leo again and he lets Falia roll him a cigarette. Leo and Falia have made friends of their own, a group of good-looking southerners who probably live a gym and a juice bar away from Loras and Renly. Theon’s in the middle of a rather crude joke when he sees Willow making her way over to him, speaking on the phone.

“Yeah, I don’t actually know him. He’s sleeping right now... Oh my god no, not at my place. He’s sleeping on the terrace of the restaurant. I’ll let you speak with his friend... Here,” she finishes, holding the phone out to Theon. “I didn’t want to pry or anything but the phone kept buzzing and buzzing and I figured maybe it was urgent?”

 _Teenagers. No fucking boundaries._ Sam’s round face is beaming at him from the screen – count on Jon for picking the worst pictures ever for his contacts.

“Yes?” he answers, cautious.

“Ehm. I just wanted to know if Jon was doing okay, because he hasn’t called since the race and I saw the results but it’s just like him to go backcountry the next day so I wanted to be sure he was okay. But he’s okay. I didn’t mean to disturb you guys!”

“Okay, cool,” Theon says, and he’s about to terminate the call when he hears Sam exclaim,

“Wait, is that Theon Greyjoy?”

“... That’s actually fucking impressive.”

“It’s the tone of dripping sarcasm,” Sam says. “It’s pretty unmistakable. Jon didn’t say you’d be there. I’m glad he’s okay. Can you make sure he eats something? He’s always ridiculously reckless after competitions, and if you could get him to eat a proper meal, or at least some fruit...”

“Excuse me,” Theon cuts in. “I thought you knew who you were talking to. I’m not his fucking mother.”

“Yes, well, I’m not here and you are,” Sam says, in that reasonable voice that Theon calls his accounting-speech. Jeyne can do it too, especially when Sam or her are trying to explain their numbers to someone who doesn’t have the head for it. “I don’t mean to be rude, but it seems to me the least you could do is...”

Theon hangs up on him. And stares. Jon’s homescreen is a picture of the Stark siblings. Robb and Sansa on the Stark couch, with Robb sprawling and Sansa sitting up straight, and the others at their feet, Jon cross-legged on the carpet with an arm around Arya and the other around Bran, and Rickon half out of the frame, already ready to run off somewhere else.

Theon locks the screen, relieved to see the image disappear.

Jon sniffs, mouth twitching. He pushes his sunglasses up.

“You got me food?”

“Don’t get used to it,” Theon says. He’s unable to rein in his annoyance and Jon’s puzzled but grateful look isn’t helping.

He shoves the plate at him and sits down on the snow beside the deckchair. Of course it’s his last cigarette. Bloody wonderful.

He tenses when something touches the back of his head – Jon’s hand, settling rough and warm at the base of his neck.

“Sam called,” Theon says. He’s standing very still, barely daring to breathe.

“Yeah? I should have messaged him when we got here. It’s the only place in the resort where I have any kind of signal.”

Jon removes his hand, having decided, presumably, that he'd have a hard time eating one-handed.

“We went skiing over the week-end,” Theon says. “It’s far-fetched but not impossible. That’s what we’ll say if anyone asks. I met up with you today and we went skiing.”

“Okay,” Jon says, around a mouthful of potatoes. “Whatever.”

“Jon. I’m serious.”

“And I’m not?” Jon takes a swig of his beer, sets it down beside the deckchair. “If anyone’s ever bragged about their conquests, it was you, not me.”

“Okay.”

“Okay,” Jon repeats.

Theon wonders if he’s disappointed, or angry, and then decides he’d rather not know. He tries to think of a change of subject.

“Can you swim?”

Jon makes a face at him. “Can I swim?”

“Yeah. You heard me right.”

“Yeah,” Jon shrugs. “I won’t set a record but I won’t sink. Why?”

“Some other week-end,” Theon says. “We could go west. Take Asha’s boat and sail out.”

Jon sets down his fork. “Why?”

“You let me come along on your backcountry outing. I thought it’d only be fair I returned the favour. I’m a decent sailor.”

“I don’t doubt that,” Jon says. He’s frowning at his plate. “I’d like that. I just don’t get how you function, Greyjoy. One minute it’s ‘I don’t date’ and the next it’s ‘meet my boyfriend Jon’? You insist it’s nothing serious and then you want me to go sailing with you? I know it’s a family thing, the sailing. A Greyjoy thing. Did you ever take anyone back there, to the Islands? Apart from Robb.”

“I didn’t have anyone to take,” Theon says. “You’re making a way bigger deal out of it than it is. It’s just a fucking boat trip. I’m not asking you to meet my dad, who’s a nutjob, by the way. Or the rest of my family, and really, you should be glad, because Asha left aside, they’re just a bunch of duffers and fanatics and crack-addicts, so... Can we stop talking about this?”

He tries to look away, but at this altitude, there isn’t much that will offer a distraction. Merely snow, snow and more snow.

“Remember that talk we had,” he says, suddenly inspired. “About the gondolas?”

Jon raises his eyebrows. “Yes?”

“If we go down a bit, not all the way to the valley. Isn’t there a gondola lift that takes you from the Stonedoor to that pass between here and Hoarfrost Hill?”

“Yes?”

Jon looks so absolutely unsure about this that Theon feels most of his confidence return.

“You’re having second thoughts?” he grins.

“This has to be the worst idea you’ve ever had,” Jon tells him. “Which is saying something.”

“So you’re saying you’ve never done it?”

“Have you?”

“Remember that girl who used to work at the restaurant? Belandra. The one Robb bet I’d never manage to turn around, because she hated me.”

“Theon, we were fourteen!” Jon exclaims. It’s hard to tell if he’s amazed or horrified.

“You were. I must have been around seventeen. Ah, fond memories.”

In truth it had been incredibly uncomfortable and once they’d reached the top, they’d been greeted by Belandra’s father, who happened to operate the gondolas. She had omitted to mention that. As she scuttled off, Theon had had to escape the guy and his snow shovel. Belandra was tiny but her father was a fucking giant.

“You’re unbelievable,” Jon says, shaking his head. But he’s smiling, and that’s all the approval Theon needs.

“So it’s a no?”

“Let me finish eating,” Jon says. “Then we can go down.”

Theon grins. “You know only one of us has to go down. The other can probably remain standing.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Jon mutters.

There’s quite a queue in front of the lift when they get there, and Theon wonders how he'll be able to secure a gondola just for the two of them. Charm? Intimidation?

Neither, it turns out, as Jon apparently knows the guy who regulates the continuous flow of skiers.

“Satin, hi.”

“Congratulations, Lord Snow," the guy says. Curly-haired and dark-eyed and delicate. He looks like a frailer, prettier version of Jon.

 _Lord Snow?_ Theon mouths at Jon, lips quirking. Jon ignores him.

“Thanks. So you’re no longer working at the cafe?”

“Yeah, in the summer,” Satin says. “In the winter I’m here.”

“How’s your skiing?”

“Better,” Satin smiles. “I’m still using those skis you got me.”

Jon shakes his head. “God, that was four years ago. I’ll get you new ones.”

Theon looks from the one to the other, curious and maybe, maybe the slightest bit annoyed. Groups are walking past them to reach the gondolas that Satin’s forgotten to man, lost as he is in Jon’s eyes. Unless it’s the other way around.

“Are you busy tonight?” Jon asks. “I could come meet you after work, we could have a beer. I’d like to know what you’ve been up to.”

“I’d like that. At six?”

“Six it is,” Jon smiles. “I’m going to sound like a right prick, but do you think we could go up alone?”

"If it's you asking," Satin says. He fucking winks.

Theon is reminded, rather abruptly, that while he dismissed Jon as being boring and unworthy of his attention, there were people who appreciated him, and got to know him and be loved by him.

This unsettling thought follows him all the way to the gondola.

"Another after-Torch snack?" he asks, dumping his skis on the bench that runs along the side of the cabin.

"Satin?" Jon says, with something like alarm. "Of course not. He sees me as... as... a sort of mentor."

He sets down his skis and gives Theon a considering look.

"Don't say it," Theon warns.

"Well you..."

"I'm not jealous," Theon snaps.

"I wasn't going to say it," Jon says. "But I'm glad you made that clear. Your aggressiveness did make me wonder."

"Get up against the wall," Theon tells him. "The ride lasts, what, five minutes?"

Jon complies readily enough, peering through the window at the cabins after them. Theon chucks his hat and sunglasses.

"They won't actually see you," he says. "Your shadow maybe. What do you want?"

"What do I want?" John repeats, incredulous.

"Reminder that you've got five minutes, Snow. No time to overthink it. I want to hear you. Start talking."

Jon looks panicked for a second. Well and truly panicked, his grey eyes wide, his hands gripping the edge of the bench.

"Come on, Snow, I've heard it before," Theon says, with an easy smile. "I've heard it from you. Don't think I'll forget about that anytime soon."

He steps forward, hands resting on Jon's hips. Above Jon's shoulders the horizon is expanding again, the sky and lacerated mountaintops turned grey by the opaque window.

"You said..."

"Will you just shut up and blow me?"

Theon's smile widens.

"You stop, I stop," he says, and sinks to his knees below the window, pushing Jon's jumper out of the way.

"I have no idea why that turns you on," Jon says. "I don't have your ability to make filth... appealing."

"Your filth is very appealing," Theon assures him, as he tugs down his zipper. "In fact, I'm not sure there's anything about you that isn't appealing."

Jon pulls at his hair, forcing his head up.

"Do you mean it when you say stuff like that, or is it just your typical Greyjoy bullshit?"

"I can tell you how hot you are or I can suck you off but I can't do both," Theon says, sitting back on his heels. "You'll have to compliment yourself."

"That's not what I asked," Jon notes.

"Timing, Snow. Timing."

Jon's fingers flex against Theon's neck - the slightest of suggestions. Theon hooks his fingers over the waistband of Jon's boxers and gives him an expectant look.

Jon shuts his eyes and lets out a harried sigh. "Suck my dick, Greyjoy."

After that he lets his head fall back against the window as Theon takes his cock in his mouth. For a time the only sounds in the cabin are the rattle of the skis banging against the bench and the rumble of the cables above, and Jon's strained breathing, which Theon is careful to listen for. If he teases the slit of Jon's cock with his tongue - if he digs his fingers into the supple skin above Jon's hipbone - if he takes as much of Jon's cock in his mouth as he can and then draws back with the slightest hint of teeth - then Jon's breath will catch and his hands will tighten upon Theon's head.

Theon doesn't expect him to speak again. So he looks up in surprise when he hears Jon rasp, "Use your fingers. Use your fingers or I won't have time to..."

When Theon doesn't react fast enough he snatches his hand and guides it behind him, until Theon finally catches on, pulling Jon's pants and boxers down, low enough that he can stroke Jon's ass. He lets go of Jon's dick long enough to suck on one of his fingers, mouth curving into a smile at the sound Jon makes, a curse that isn't quite a curse for how it remains trapped in his throat.

"I'm already blowing you, that shouldn't make you any hornier," he says, returning his hand to Jon's ass. "Fuck, is there anything about you that isn't perfect."

Jon laughs, a little self-deprecatingly like this is the most ridiculous thing he's ever heard. Theon punishes him by sticking his finger inside him without much warning, holding his breath at the way Jon clenches around him. Suddenly he finds himself agreeing with Jon. This was a daft idea. Now he'll have to disembark with the maddening knowledge that this is what Jon feels like and that this is what Jon likes - that he could fuck him and Jon would probably enjoy it.

"Running out of time," Jon reminds him, voice gruff, as he reaches for Theon's head again and pushes his cock against his lips.

Theon opens his mouth obligingly, reaccustoms himself to the stretch of it and the weight of it on his tongue, sucking harder so they'll be done in time. The tremor running through Jon's legs is an encouraging sign that he's getting close, and Theon wraps a hand around the base of Jon's cock and uses his other hand to fuck Jon in the ass, letting his finger slide out and then thrusting back in.

"Can I fuck your mouth?" Jon asks. An actual question, as if his dick weren't already halfway down Theon's throat.

Theon withdraws his hand from Jon's cock long enough to give him the finger. Jon replies by thrusting forward into his mouth, once and twice and a third, merciless time that has Theon's eyes water as he tries to take in all of Jon's dick at once - it would have been way easier if he'd been lacking in that department, at least, which he might or might not tell him later. He's got a sneaking suspicion that Jon's quietness and hesitation don't conceal a lack of self-confidence but rather an excess of stubborn pride.

Theon lets Jon come in his mouth and swallows it all though he doesn't think he'll ever get used to it - too viscous and too sour, though he likes the thought of having Jon's taste in his mouth, along with the burn at the back of his throat. A bittersweet memory. It seems fitting.

He rises on wobbling legs, accepting Jon's hand, and half-stumbles against him as the gondola lurches to the side. They stop.

Theon looks out at the landing dock, some three hundred feet away beyond another swaying gondola.

"The fuck," he says, and swivels round to find Jon wheezing with laughter.

"Seriously," Jon pants, holding his stomach with his pants still halfway down his thighs. "Seriously."

"If we stay here more than two minutes I'm going to take this personally," Theon vows, striding towards the other window to look down at the cabins behind them. There's a long string of them, all the way down to their starting point. The slope beneath the cabins is dotted with skiers, a string of newbies like ducklings in a row behind their mother, trying to master the snowplough without falling on their asses, and a few more adventurous idiots flying off bumps to the side of the slope, where the ground is more uneven and scattered with trees.

"Fuck it," he decides, and sticks a hand down the front of his pants to jerk himself off, with hard twists of the wrist and his whole body leaning into it, hips angled forwards.

For a full minute maybe Jon just stares, and then he quickly zips himself up and he comes over, pushing Theon back against the window.

"Let me," he says.

Theon takes his hand and wraps it around his cock, and Jon follows his rhythm easily enough, after a few uneven pumps.

"You look so good," Jon mumbles into his ear. "I'm so done with all the rushing - tonight we'll take it slow."

"Yeah? Tell me then. Tell me what you'll do," Theon says, as their hands begin to move faster and he clutches the back of Jon's jacket.

"I'll use my mouth," Jon says. "Get you worked up. It's about the stimulation... knowing when to let go so you'd be ready to cry because you want it so much. Then when you're ready I'd let you ride me. I'm guessing you'd want to have me on all fours, fucking me from behind because it gives you a thrill. Then it'd go fast. I'd let you fuck me hard."

"That way," Theon shudders, "any other way." He grips Jon's hair, pulls his face back so their eyes will meet. For a bewildering moment he wonders how he could have ever thought that grey eyes were duller than blue. Jon's gaze is far too intense, dark and molten. Theon leans in, licking his lips. He comes with Jon's hand on his cock and Jon's tongue in his mouth and that look seared upon his eyelids.

"Fuck," he stammers. "I hope you've been praised for... the eye-fucking. Because you're bloody brilliant at that, too."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Jon says, stepping aside. He reaches in his pocket for a tissue but Theon still sees him lick his fingers, and at this point, with his spent dick and his dry throat, it seems like added torture.

"You're a bloody tease, Snow. 'I don't have your ability to make filth appealing.' My ass."

Jon smiles, that slightly awkward tilt of the lips like maybe he's apologizing for not being happier.

Theon crosses over and kisses him, and then kisses him again, swallowing Jon's muffled sound of protest. As if on cue the gondola begins moving again, sending them crashing into a window. Theon tries to draw back, to see if Jon's alright, but Jon reels him back in and they resume kissing, all the way to the docking area.

"We're skiing five minutes and then I'm kissing you again," Theon warns him, stepping away to grab his skis.

"Okay," Jon says, sounding like maybe this was the most he could manage with his shortened breath.

Theon steps out and has to swallow back an unexpected burst of laughter. For here on the platform is Belandra's father. He's as massive as he was nearly a decade ago, heavier around the waist, maybe, and with more pepper in his black beard.

How lucky, Theon reflects, that he's no longer the lanky teen he used to be.

Belandra's father raises his head. He takes one look at Theon and his bushy black brows gather above his deep-set eyes.

"Okay, I'll see you down there," Theon says, with a quick smile, and with years of practice kicking in he throws down both skis on the metal grid of the platform, snaps his boots into place and pushes off.

By the time Belandra's father starts after him, he's already propelled himself over the four steps leading out to the snow, and he's sliding away towards the slope.

Jon catches up with him about halfway down. Theon slides around a ski jump and Jon goes for it much like Robb would have, once upon a time. Theon skids to a stop as soon as he recognizes the dark blue jacket, watching Jon fly over him and then execute a perfect landing some sixty feet below.

"What was that about?" Jon shouts as Theon skis up to him.

"You don't wanna know," Theon assures him. The rush of adrenaline has yet to wear off and he feels in equal parts exhilarated and afraid, because he can still remember how hard that snow shovel had come down upon his back, sending him to the ground in a tangle of skis and sticks and twisted legs. He'd borne the mark for weeks.

Jon slides away and reappears a few feet below, blocking his path. "And your jaw?" he asks.

Theon has to swerve hard to avoid hitting him.

"What?"

"I know that's why you've been growing that stubble," Jon says, gesturing towards his face. "Someone clocked you in the jaw."

"Light's going down, we can't just stop in the middle of a slope, you should know that," Theon tells him. But Jon's just jerked him off in a gondola before dazzling him with his aerial skills. For once the truth comes out more readily than the lies. "Robb," he shouts back, above the cries of children and the ever-present wind.

"He's been acting out recently," Jon says.

He resumes skiing and Theon follows him. Jon veers onto a beginner's run. The track is uneventful but it leads into the trees, away from the main slope and the final hubbub of the late afternoon. They can ski side by side and carry out a semblance of conversation.

"Is it about Jeyne?" Jon asks.

"Why do you assume I know more than you do?" Theon retorts.

"Because it's always been a bloody challenge," Jon says. "Who does Robb like the most, who does Robb trust the most. You've probably forgotten." He takes a wider turn, returns to Theon's side. "When we were kids, like twelve or so? You were twelve. I must have been nine. We all went skiing near Winterfell. You took me to this black run and you said, the one who finishes first keeps Robb. I said it was stupid." Another swerve, and this time Jon rides Theon hard against the white bank on the edge of the track. "Because he was my brother so it's not like I'd ever lose him. And you went, you're not his actual brother. It doesn't count."

Theon grits his teeth, and around the next bend it's him who pushes Jon against the bank. Jon's left stick screeches as it skids against the ice.

"Did you do it, then?" he asks.

Because Jon was right. He's forgotten everything about that particular occurrence, though if he gave it some thought he could probably remember others like it.

"Yeah, of course," Jon says. "I got to the bottom of the slope and when I looked back I realised you'd never even gone down."

"We both know he doesn't give a fuck that you're not his actual brother," Theon says, and with a final shove he sends them both in the narrow ditch below the bank.

For a long time they don't move. He can hear Jon's heavy breathing behind him. At some point while they came down it began to drizzle and now it's snowing in earnest, with big clusters of snowflakes that Theon has to blink away from his eyelashes.

"What is wrong with you, Greyjoy," Jon groans.

"Oh, come on, you started it," Theon says.

He tries to move but both his legs are stuck, one of them at an awkward angle. He tries to reach for one of his sticks.

"Bloody moron," Jon says, but he says it as he brings down his stick upon Theon's fixations, freeing one of his feet. Theon twists around and punches the other, and with both feet able to move again, he proceeds to throw his skis and sticks out of the ditch. Then he pulls Jon up by the front of his jacket and steps on his fixations to help him get out of his skis as well.

They step back onto the empty track.

"Are you alright?"

Jon pushes his glasses up and looks at him strangely.

"Yes. I'm alright. Eight-year-olds fall into this ditch every day and I'm pretty sure they're alright, too."

"Whatever," Theon sighs.

He makes to walk over to his skis, but Jon stops him, his gloved hand closing around his sleeve. "What?"

Jon doesn't answer, doesn't move at all until Theon steps back and wraps an arm around his neck. He's not quite sure why he's doing it, but it feels good and that's enough for him - Jon's arm around his waist and Jon's beard scratching his cheek as their breathing quiets down.

"I was so wrong about you," Jon murmurs. "I'm really glad for how wrong I was."

Theon doesn't have anything to say to that, because Jon's right but he's also so very wrong, so he just holds him closer, for however long this can last.

He's come to terms with the idea that the Jon he's found here is about as impossible to seize as the surrounding snow. Too soft and too cold, and the moment Theon leaves the mountains, this Jon will dissolve like a handful of fresh powder.

The forest around them is growing dark and it is becoming obvious that they should be going down. When Jon remains silent, Theon takes it upon himself to draw back first.

"You've got a date with the gondola boy."

"Yes," Jon says. "We're going to hold hands above a pot of fondue and lick the cheese from each other's mouths. It'll be terribly sexy and you're going to miss it."

Theon stares at him for a second before bursting into startled laughter.

"Okay," he wheezes. "Point taken."

He leans in to kiss Jon one last time and goes to retrieve his skis.

They part at the bottom of the slope, with Jon heading towards the gondolas and Theon preparing to ski down to Mole's Town.

"It's the restaurant behind the main street. I can't remember the name."

"The Thistle."

"Right! The Thistle. Meet you there at 8?"

"Yeah," Jon smiles. "I'll see you there."

Theon lifts a stick in salute and veers off into the dark.


	10. Chapter 10

"When we got engaged we decided we wanted to hike in the Dornish mountains. A week without the civilisation, you know? You really get in touch with yourself."

"What Leo means is that we wandered for a week wearing the same clothes and half of his backpack was hard liquor and shrooms," Falia grins. "Best holiday of my life. My hair'd never been that filthy."

"I've never been to Dorne," Theon says. "I'm not sure the climate would agree with me."  
  
"Too hot for you?"  
  
"Too dry. My family's from the Iron Islands. It's all salt and dripping seaweed back there."  
  
"But you grew up here?"

"Yeah," Theon says, turning his phone over so he can gaze at the time. 20:10. "My crazy father sent my brothers into a storm, they died, and when he tried to do the same to my sister and me, social services got involved. I came to live with a family in Winterfell."

"That's harsh, man," Leo says.  
  
"Whatever. It was a while ago. Do you know what you'll be having?"  
  
"Another of these," Falia says, indicating her empty pint.  
  
Theon orders another round.

At twenty past he excuses himself and steps outside with his phone and one of Falia's cigarettes. He tries calling Jon. Forces himself to finish the cigarette before be calls again. Jon is probably still with Satin, drinking and talking and he's lost track of time. There's no reason to think he might be hurt. Not on such an easy slope.

That's what he'd thought when he'd gotten Sansa's message about Robb. _On the Freys' slope? It can't be serious._

He tries calling Jon again, idly kicking the snow that's gathered at the curb. When Jon still won't answer, he steps away from the restaurant and walks around it towards the main street. Mole's Town is pretty much dead at night - most of the skiers and snowboarders and tourists tend to stay in Winterfell. The town has the one hotel and two restaurants and a single, old-timey bar that closes at ten.

Theon looks up and down the street, checks his phone again. He's about to write another message to Jon when he sees his previous message has been read.

The sudden surge of relief takes him by surprise, as he sinks down to the pavement with a hand pressed to his forehead. _Thank fucking God._ He'll strangle Jon when he gets his hands on him, but in the meantime he must be fine, and if he's got signal he's probably around here somewhere.

Theon rises and he's about to go back towards the restaurant when he sees that he's being watched. The slender silhouette is familiar, as is the red and black woollen jacket.

"Hey!" he calls, crossing over towards the bar.

Satin is standing under the awning with a couple other guys. They're smoking, he's not.  
  
"Satin, right?"  
  
Satin nods.  
  
"You're Jon's friend."

"We were supposed to meet up. Any idea where he is?"  
  
"He asked me when the next bus was."  
  
"The next bus?"  
  
"To Winterfell."  
  
"He took the bus to Winterfell?"

Theon has to resist the urge to grab Satin by the collar and shake him. He looks embarrassed, which means he knows something, and the guys beside him on the porch are starting to eavesdrop, casting them curious glances as they pull on their cigarettes.

"He said he was going home," Satin says. "But I think he meant Cerwyn, not Winterfell. He..."  
  
"He wouldn't have left without telling me. That's not like him."  
  
"Man, what did you do?" one of the guys says.  
  
"The wrong little faggot," another smirks.

"Okay," Theon says. "We're having this talk on the other side of the street, where your mates won't..."

"I'm sorry man, you're the one airing your dirty laundry in public," the third guy says. He's shorter than the others and his knuckles are bruised. In a fight, he's the one Theon would be watching out for.

On many other nights, Theon would have smelled the beer on the man's breath and laughed in his face before stepping aside. He knows how to avoid stupid, hopeless fights, especially with drunkards who are as likely to go down after the first punch as to rise with a broken bottle in hand. He should know - he's got the scars to prove it. But the last week has been a roller-coaster of nonsense and this is only the culmination of it. Theon strikes on autopilot, his fist colliding with the guy's mouth. The punch sends him into his mates so that for a second they're all tottering as pint glasses smash against the snow-covered ground.

"What the..."

One of the men takes a swing at him but Satin steps swiftly between them, shoving Theon sideways with a surprisingly strong hand. The guy's fist hovers in front of Satin's face. He lowers it.

"Fuck off," Satin says. "He's not looking for a fight, but if he did I have a bunch of friends in here who'd jump in." He pulls out his wallet, slaps a bill against the man's chest. "Here's for the beers." Before their addled senses can react, he's snatched Theon's arm and pulled him across the street.

"For the record, I don't even know these guys," he says. "Jon left half an hour ago. He got a phone call and then when I asked him what his plans were, he asked about the buses."

Theon ponders his options.

He doesn't run after people. Then again this whole trip to Mole's Town came about because he decided to run after Jon. There's no saying where he might be, though, and if he won't answer his calls... He crosses his arms against the evening chill.

"Call him," he tells Satin. "Tell him you wanted to check on him. Get him to tell you where he is."  
  
"He's not answering your calls," Satin says. "If he's avoiding you, there has to be a reason."

"Yes and I'd like to know what it is." All that forced patience is lending his voice a cutting edge. "Did he say anything?"

"One minute he was fine and the next he was swearing a lot. Which isn't something he usually does."

Under any other circumstances, the thought that he's been rubbing off on Jon would have made Theon smile.

Satin has his phone in hand, which Theon will consider progress.  
  
"You can tell him I manipulated you into making that call, he won't hold it against you."

"I'm not that stupid," Satin mutters, even as he brings up Jon's contact on his phone. "I know you're manipulating me right now. Acting all hurt and agitated. ... Yes, Jon?"

He steps away even as Theon remains stuck on his words, on the harrowing thought that he might have been looking "hurt".

"He's on his way to the airport, he's hoping to make the night flight," Satin says as he returns. "He's still pissed."

"About what?"  
  
"I'm guessing you, if he left you here? Do you need me to call you a taxi or something?"

"I'm not running after him," Theon says. "I have better things to do with my time. Thanks for calling. And for the mess back there," he adds, nodding towards the bar.

"I don't know what's going on between you, and you don't seem like the kind of guy who'd take advice from someone like me. But really if there's one guy who's worth running after, it's Jon Snow."

"Don't take it personally. I don't follow people's advice, as a rule," Theon says.

And yet.

And yet he spends five minutes back in his seat at the restaurant before he's making excuses to Leo and Falia and calling a cab. A cab in Mole's Town - it'll cost him a fucking fortune. And if he wants to be at the airport before 10 he'll have to take all his gear with him because he won't be able to swing by the Stark house along the way.

He could try calling Jon again, or even just writing to him, but something holds him back.

He has enough suspicions about what happened that he's willing to delay that confrontation until the last possible second. So he doesn't try to contact Jon and he doesn't contact Robb, either.

In retrospect, it seems completely stupid on his part not to have thought Robb and Jon might be in touch during the week-end. Robb would have known Jon was doing the race; eventually, he was bound to call. Theon should consider himself lucky, in fact, that with their lack of signal and the exhaustion and their absorption in each other, he got to enjoy Jon for the better part of a day.

The flights to Cerwyn all depart from the same airport. Theon gets there at nine thirty, when the terminals are still crowded with families and gangs of college students who can be relied upon to leave their bags and gear lying around and who'll board their flights drunk. If Asha were here he'd complain out loud and she'd make fun of him. _Gosh, you can be such an old codger, Theon._ And he'd think, but not say, _I've tried the binge-drinking and the partying and it damn near killed me._

He's bought an overpriced ticket on the way to the airport and he has to charm the girl at the counter so she'll let him check in his gear despite the fact that "skis should be checked in two hours ahead, sir, as was stipulated in the email you should have received along with your booking confirmation..."

Theon might not be drunk but he feels off his game nonetheless. After a time he gives up on the smile and gestures tiredly towards his bags.

"I just want to go home. With or without the skis. I'd rather not leave them because it's a damn waste of money but..."

"Here," the flight attendant says, slapping a sticker on the bag. "I'm tired too, don't let anyone know I let this slide. Go get your flight."

He thanks her profusely - and makes a note for future occasions that this works, too, the lassitude and the febrility.

Jon in asleep on a chair in the boarding section with his arms crossed over his chest and his headphones on. Theon comes to stand in front of him, marvelling at the fact that Jon is still frowning, even in sleep. Touching him doesn't seem like such a good idea right now, so Theon is relieved when Jon wakes up by himself, grey eyes hazy and languid until he recognizes Theon; then the frown returns. He pulls his headphones down around his neck.

"We're adults, right?" Theon says. "We can have a damn talk."

Jon's face doesn't betray much, but if Theon had to venture a guess, he'd say that Jon's too angry to speak.

"I'm going to need a few days," Jon says, at last, "before I can speak to you. And even then... even then it better be work-related."

"Do I get to know what happened?"

Theon's never been good at keeping still. It's what Ramsay had said, after the glass shard had ripped his arm open. _I didn't actually mean to cut you. If you'd just stayed still..._ The words hadn't really carried any weight at the time, lying as he was in a pool of his own blood with Ramsay trying not to smile. But it's true nevertheless. He kicks the metal frame of Jon's chair and he keeps clenching and unclenching his hand. He wants to punch Jon. He wants to crawl onto his lap and fist a hand in his hair.

"You know what happened," Jon says, still in that low, angry voice. Theon's seen him lash out in the past. He knows that's how it starts - a rising wind, and then the full-on blizzard. "Robb called."

"Jon. Three days ago..." Theon holds a hand against his face and takes a steadying breath. Would that this had happened a day before now. "Three days ago, we didn't spend time together unless we had a business meeting. How would that have gone down, if at any point today I'd just gone, by the way, Robb and I have unresolved issues?"

"Unresolved issues," Jon repeats.

He's looking up at Theon with that insolent look Theon had found so attractive back in Jon's office, when seducing Jon had seemed like a game he might play and win.

"I thought you knew," Theon says. "Up until this morning, I really thought you knew. Robb might have tried to hide it from other people but he sure as hell didn't try to hide it from you."

"You really think I'd have started this if I knew?"

Jon gets to his feet. Theon might have a few inches on him but it doesn't make much of a difference. Jon can look unnervingly intimidating when he wants to.

"You figured I could take it? You and Robb. Well, fuck you. My life is enough of a mess as it is without you..."

"Your life isn't a mess," Theon says, despite knowing, as usual, that he very well shouldn't. But a part of him is still in Mole's Town, hanging onto his phone as he considers the possibility that Jon might be...

"I fell!" Jon shouts. "I fucking fell, too!"

"What?" Theon says, startled. Then, "When?"

"Last year, on Castle Black! And I didn't tell you, I didn't tell Robb or you, because I thought you'd already been through enough. But does it really make a difference? How do you get to judge..."

"I shouldn't have, okay? I shouldn't have. Just... This... This thing started and I didn't exactly come into it prepared. I thought you knew..."

"For fuck's sake, Theon..."

"... And when I found out you didn't, it seemed better to keep my mouth shut, yeah. But this isn't about Robb..."

"Like hell it isn't."

"It fucking isn't!" Theon insists. "I want this." It feels like the words are being ripped from his throat, but it's a relief to have them out in the open. "I want this. You and your... your competitions and the skiing and if you fall, I want to know about it."

Jon looks taken aback for all of five seconds before the bitterness returns.

"There's no situation where we'd put each other ahead of Robb."

"Are you fucking kidding me?" Theon snaps. "I've been doing nothing else for the past two days! I'm here! I'm not in Cerwyn, I spent the week-end following you everywhere including to this damn airport in the middle of the night!"

"And you think this is worth it? Us losing Robb over what, a day in the mountains and a couple fucks? God, Theon." Jon rubs his jaw, and he looks like he's about to say something else when he catches sight of something behind Theon that causes him to pause. “Are you filming this? You think this is funny?”

Theon barely has time to turn around that Jon has shoved past him. One of the many groups of college students in flashing snow suits was standing right behind them. Jon snatches one of the guys’ phones and before the guy can issue more than a weak, “Hey, dude”, the phone is on the floor with pieces of the screen lying around it.

“Oh my god,” a girl says.

It’s delightfully ironic, Theon notes, that they should be wearing Stark & Snow gear. The wolf’s head is stamped all over their clothes. Last year’s collection – their first. They had Jon pose for the posters.

“Were you actually filming?” Theon asks.  
  
“I’m going to get security on your ass,” the guy vows, “and you’ll get me a new phone...”

“I”ll take that as a yes. Nasty habit,” Theon muses, kneeling to retrieve the phone. “Ah, man. Well and truly smashed. I’d say we’re even and maybe it teaches you a lesson?”

“What’s going on here?”

They all turn towards the security guard. Theon is about to say something when one of the girls pipes up, “Nothing. Ben dropped his phone.”

The guard gives them a dubious look but he steps aside. After a crackling jingle, the speakers overhead inform them that boarding has begun, and that their plane will soon take off. Ben gives them a nasty glare as he snatches back his broken phone.

“Can’t we talk this over?” Theon asks.  
  
“I’m done talking. I know you. You talk and you smile and by the time I look away the building’s on fire. We’re done here. We’re just done.”

There’s one thing left to try – it’s madness at this point but Theon figures he might as well take something away from the wreckage. He seizes Jon’s collar and moves in for a kiss.

Jon remains still at first. Then his mouth opens under Theon’s and his teeth sink into Theon’s bottom lip, right where Robb had punched him a couple days ago. Jon steps back and licks the blood on his lips.

“Robb?” he asks. “I thought so.”

It might have been better to let Jon disappear, Theon reflects. To stay in Mole’s Town, let him scamper. And once they’d been back they could just have pretended, one way or another, that nothing had ever happened.

Because there’ll be no ignoring him now, and as it turns out, impervious as he thought he was to the end of flings, it’s fucking painful to have to stand here, and watch him walk away.


	11. Chapter 11

For the first two or three weeks after they'd officially launched Stark & Snow, Theon had driven Robb to work.

As far as the (then limited) staff of the firm knew, Jon included, Robb was wary of driving because of his bad leg. The actual reason was that Robb lived on top of a mountain at the end of a winding road, and since Theon slept there most nights, it made little sense for them to leave for work separately.

That, and Robb was wary of driving because of his bad leg.

They would usually leave at 8 and be in at around 9 - this was back when they were still trying to set an example for the rest of the firm. Robb's idea, not Theon's. Nowadays, Theon will be in at 9.30 most days; Robb at either 9 or 10, depending on what he did the night before, but he'll often stay in late to compensate.

Thus by showing up at Robb's house at 7.30, Theon is reasonably sure he'll catch him before he leaves for work.

A look in the rear-view mirror informs him that he looks like he has seen neither the sun nor a bed for the past three weeks. His eyes are red-rimmed and his skin lacks colour. One would think he's spent the week-end drinking. He's already on his third cigarette and his second coffee, a disgusting, chemical brew he's bought at a drive-in along the way.

Robb's house is mostly made of glass, much like his office. It wasn't built for him and Theon had made fun of him when he'd bought it - it was such a pretentious construct, completely at odds with its environment and with Robb himself. Robb might trim his beard and wear tailored suits, but there's still something fundamentally rustic about him. What he needs is an actual chalet, not a box with glass panes and a wooden frame.

"I want it," Robb had said. "I want it to represent me."

They've done interviews in it over the past year and a number of photo-shoots.

Theon doesn't like it. He prefers the clutter of the Stark house back in Winterfell. Gee, he'd even prefer the Greyjoy houses on the islands back home, all of them smelling like dampness and mildew. He suspects that Robb doesn't like it all that much, either. There was a time when Robb would have been open about it - when Theon would have been the first person he chose to tell it to. Now Theon can only conjecture.

He kicks the door a few times. He knows all of Robb's morning rituals - a half hour of exercise that used to be an hour-long run through the woods behind the house, a shower and only once he's fully dressed and ready to go, coffee in the patio at the back. There he'll check his email. Sometime he'll call Sansa, or his mother.

These rituals came about progressively in the last two weeks Theon hung around the house. Before that, they'd get up at any hour before 11 and have sex wherever they stumbled upon each other. The bedroom. The kitchen if Robb had gotten up for coffee. The patio if Theon had gone running. The shower, the living-room couch, Theon's car.

Robb opens the door. Theon can tell he'd been about to leave: he looks ready for work, with his dark grey slacks and his blue-grey shirt and the smell of his after-shave, slightly fainter than the smell of coffee.

"Hey, asshole," Theon says.

Robb must have known it was him – there can't be many people who'll show up at his house at such an ungodly hour and kick the door as a salute. Still he looks like Theon's caught him unawares.

"Hey. I was about to lea..."

"I took a flight in the middle of the night because you fucked up my week-end. You can give me ten minutes," Theon declares, shoving him aside.

It's enough of a calculated move that when Robb loses his balance Theon's arm is right there to push him back against the wall, steadying him.

"Coffee?" he asks, walking over to the wide, airy kitchen.

"Counter."

Theon takes a seat at the table and Robb remains standing, leaning onto his cane.

"Somehow I can't imagine that it went well for you, either," Theon says. "He's good at being angry."

"I wasn't going to let you play with him just to get back at me. I told you he was out of bounds."

"What makes you think I was playing? What makes you think Jon wasn't?"

"You're always playing," Robb snorts, leaning the cane against the table as he takes a seat too. It's a new cane, Theon notices. Black with a silver wolf's head. "And Jon never..." Robb stops short, frowning slightly. "You called him Jon. That's new."

"Yes, I have this rule where I stop calling people by their last name after we've fucked."

 _Not that I did fuck him,_ he thinks. _Properly, that is._

Technicalities.

"Your jaw still looks fucking terrible," Robb says. "And your lip's all... do you want some ice?"

He makes to hobble over to the fridge and stops when Theon issues a high-pitched sound that doesn't quite qualify as laughter. He drops his head into his hands. After a moment, something touches his shoulder blade. It brings back a memory of Jon reaching out much in the same way, a day ago up on the slopes. Robb's hands are stronger than Jon's, the palms wider. Theon doesn't need the touch of skin on skin to know what they feel like - warm and smooth where Jon's are drier, slightly bonier.

"How fucking dare you," Theon mumbles. Robb withdraws his hand. "How fucking dare you tell him?" He raises his head. "You could have done it from the start. Jon, by the way, me and Theon. It'd have forced you to put a name on it. We're fucking, casually. We're best friends but also each other's favourite shag. We're kind of exclusive."

"You were never..."

"I was never what!" Theon jumps to his feet, his voice like a cracking whip. "I asked, 'is this serious?' and you laughed in my face. You told me to come over for the holidays and I asked you what you wanted me there as and you sprung the whole 'we're like brothers' charade on me. You said you fucking loved me and when I brought it up..."

"You kept shagging people left and right!"

"Because you said this didn't matter!" Theon shouts back, gesturing between them as if he were talking about some sort of vortex, rather than their strained relationship. "What the fuck was I supposed to do? Let it gnaw at me? I'm not that fucking stupid!"

"How was I to know you wanted to... to give it a try?" Robb is white as a sheet now, clutching the cane like a lifeline.

"Robb, I was practically living there by the time you kicked me out," Theon seethes. "I slept here. My clothes were in your dresser. Some probably still are. Is this what it looks like when two bachelors live together? Fucking three or four times a night, watching movies on your couch with your head on my knees? That's what house-sharing looks like to you?"

"You brought back a girl," Robb says.

"Yes," Theon says, reining himself in because apparently Robb needs to have everything spelled out to him. "After you told me this had to stop because, and I quote, 'this is no longer working for me.'"

"The circles I was in... The guys don't date guys. It doesn't happen. It's not... I grew up with that kind of background and I know it's toxic, but it's hard to just..."

"Give me a fucking break," Theon snaps. "You think I don't know that? I was patient with you, but there comes a point where it's not just internalised prejudices. It's just you being too goddamn stubborn. You want me or you don't. You said you didn't."

"Of course I do!"

Theon raises his eyebrows. "I missed an episode there. Between 'we're never speaking about this again' and 'I like the girl from the accounting department.'"

"Of course I want you," Robb repeats. "How could I not. You're just..." He makes an indistinct gesture that could indicate Theon's body or Theon in general or maybe just his presence in the kitchen.

"This is going so well," Theon remarks. "I mean, keep going, that's long overdue, it's useless at this point but I'd still like to hear it."

He sees something flash across Robb's face. Hurt, fear. The ghost of a slap, maybe. Robb’s staring at him with wide blue eyes.

Theon feels like every night he's pulled another cigarette from the pack thinking, this is the last one. Like a greedy child, sick to his stomach with sweets. Like a fucking junkie.

"Fuck," he mutters. "Fuck. Come... don't..."

He reaches for Robb just as Robb reaches for him, hands on each other's shoulders, on each other's necks, framing each other's faces. Kissing Robb is like swimming, like putting on the clothes that make you look best, like the first drop after the roller coaster has climbed to the top of the slope. Familiar and forever strange and forever delirious.

Every fever Theon's ever had. Parched mouth and stinging eyelids, his hands clutching fabric as his mouth voices words he doesn't ever want to remember himself saying.

"You're an idiot... you're a goddamn idiot... I want him... I want him."

Robb draws back. "What?"

Theon remains in place with his hands still up in the air and his eyes screwed shut. As far as embarrassing moments go, this takes the fucking cake.

Worse than finding out that the girl with the horse-riding crop from Margaery Tyrell's costumed party was Robb's new secretary. Worse than that time he'd dragged one of Robb's competitors backstage for a quick blowjob and answered the guy's pasty "Is that good?" with "Yeah, Robb, it's good."

"Jon," Robb says, like he's willing to give Theon an out and let him talk himself out of this one like he has so many others. "You want Jon."

"I want Jon," Theon confirms, his eyes still closed. "Fuck."

“He won’t speak to me.”

“Robb or Jon?” Sansa asks, peering at him above the rim of her wide yellow-tinted sunglasses.

“Snow. He’s been giving me a hell of a cold shoulder.”

She takes a sip of her coffee and looks at the kids playing below the war memorial on the other side of the street.

“Is this when I admit I knew about Robb and you?”

“I figured you did,” Theon shrugs. “We were idiots about it.”

“That time I showed up at his place with coffee and he tried to pretend you’d met up at 7am to jog...”

“We were idiots about it,” Theon repeats. “Fuck, we still are.”

“I didn’t know how to help you when...”

“You bought me a table. It was cute of you.”

She punches his shoulder and he traps her wrist, laughing. “Like brother...”

Sansa tries to free her hand. Though he can’t see her eyes, he can tell from her slack mouth that she’s serious, and maybe slightly appalled.

“Did Robb punch you?”

She touches the tips of her fingers to his jaw.

“That must have hurt.”

“My ego’s still smarting.”

“So, what was it that changed your mind about Jon? I thought you thought he was intensely boring.”

“Well,” Theon grins. “It’s not the kind of thing one can share with a lady.” Still holding her wrist, he gives her knuckles a light-hearted kiss.

“Oh, give me a break,” Sansa snorts. “I suppose I should have guessed it would be a sex thing. It’s you we’re talking about. It’s just... it doesn’t make much sense on Jon’s side.”

“Why?” Theon says, falsely offended. “Because I’m not attractive enough?”

Sansa snatches her hand back and cuffs him on the side of the head. “Oh my god. I guess I should be relieved. Whatever happened, it didn’t change you one bit. I guess I’ll have to talk to Jon, then.”

“You two have never been close, either,” Theon points out.

“That you know of,” Sansa says, wrinkling her nose. It makes her look candyfloss-levels-of-sweet, and suddenly he’s grateful for her presence here. With Asha having returned to Bear Island, he doesn’t have much in the way of people he can talk to. Robb’s sister is a friend, albeit of the tenderly scolding sort.

“Did you know he’d taken a tumble?” he asks. “Last year, on Castle Black.”

“A tumble?” Sansa's funny grimace turns into a frown. “He lost all his gear and he had to spend the night at 15,000 feet with only a windbreaker and a headlamp, on a ledge you couldn’t stand on with your two feet. Actually, they were so sure he’d died they decided to wait out the storm before sending a party to get the body. The next day some madwoman set out to do Castle Black, storm or no storm. She found him and she radioed down. There were articles and everything, but they never knew it was him. I made sure of that – he asked me to.”

“What the fuck,” Theon says. “You’re telling me he spent a night hanging from Castle Black and we never heard of it? Less than a year ago?”

“Oh, he never worried about you,” Sansa says. She pushes up her sunglasses, giving him a penetrative stare that Theon doesn’t quite like. “It was mostly about Robb. You’d just started the firm...”

Theon is about to say that it’s absurd, and that for sure he’d remember if Jon had gone missing. Something holds him back.

He remembers that winter more than he’d care to. It’d been in the weeks after Robb put an end to things. Theon had spent those weeks acting out and fucking a great deal of people he hopes he’ll never meet again. In fact, if there was ever a time in his life when he’d have been likely to make a move on Jon unprompted, it would have been that sore winter.

Gee, he’d even made a move on Sansa back then, and in retrospect it’s a damn good thing she turned him down. (“ _Keep sleeping with people who don’t care about you, okay?"_ she'd said. _"Because there’ll come a time when you need me to love you. And if we sleep together, I’ll just start hating you. I know how you deal with your flings.”_ )

The bottom line is, he didn’t get to make a vengeful move on Jon because Jon wasn’t there. He was around for the first couple weeks after the firm started, when it was only the three of them in the building, but after that, Theon has no memory of him being around, not until some meeting late in spring when they nearly came to blows in front of the entire Stark & Snow team.

To assuage a nagging doubt, he pulls out his phone and searches through the emails Jon sent him over the past year. For the most part, this means working his way through months of debates over the value of Tormund’s graphic design team. Eventually, he does find what he’s looking for – the email Jon must have sent from that hospital bed, when he decided that for some idiotic, noble-minded reason, Robb and Theon shouldn’t be made aware of his situation.

And then it’s only a matter of scrolling down the page to find his reply.

“What are you doing?” Sansa asks.

“Rehashing old mistakes,” he mutters.


	12. Chapter 12

Theon arrives early for the next weekly debrief. It seems wise given that both Jon and Robb are angry at him – angry or just done, it's hard to say, but he'd rather not invite another dressing-down from either of them. They're not here when he comes in.

“Hello,” Jeyne says as she joins him, a little hesitantly. She looks around at the empty table as if she’s at a loss where to sit.

Theon wordlessly pulls out the chair next to him.

“It’s been a little cold, hasn’t it?” she says as she sits down.

She’s got one of these ridiculously elaborate braids, the kind that seems to require professional dexterity. At least an MA, with a specialisation in sailors’ knots.

“Yeah,” he replies, returning his eyes to his phone. “Weather’s going to be shit all week, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Hopefully it’ll be better in Queenscrown on Saturday.”

“Queenscrown,” Theon repeats, looking up from his newsfeed. “What?”

“The... The biathlon?” Jeyne ventures. “The National Cup?”

“Right,” Theon drawls out, eyes narrowed, as she turns in haste to her blank page of notes.

The biathlon, of course. The world’s most random competition in the form of skiing and rifle-shooting, and the probable reason why Jon has barely been in so far this week. Theon should have known better than to assume Jon was merely avoiding him.

The others begin to arrive and the room fills up with the bustle of conversations and chairs being drawn back and pages being turned. Theon falls back into the role of the guy at ease with everyone, and for five minutes maybe, it’s as if the last week had never happened. No one has dared broach the subject openly with him, though he knows at this point they must all have seen the video. He wouldn’t put it past the IT department to have forwarded it to the firm’s internal mailing list.

No one but Mya, that is, he corrects himself as she walks in. She’s got the same kind of complicated braid as Jeyne. He pictures them sitting outside Robb’s office, braiding each other’s hair and exchanging gossip. The truth is, she looks rather formidable with her long skirt, her white jumper and her glossy leather boots. There are moments when he really regrets pissing her off.

The first time he’d seen her after coming back from the mountains had been one such occasion.

"Did no one ever tell you you shouldn't sleep with your colleagues, let alone your boss?” she’d said. And with a glimmer of bitter amusement, she’d added, “I sure hope it was the best shag you ever had, because man, that's going to be awkward."

"Snow's not my boss," Theon had answered, with a good measure of spite.

Now Mya stands in the doorway with a pleased smile and a few wisps of blond hair dancing around her temples as she announces, "The fern is back!"

This announcement cuts most conversations short and provokes a concert of delighted exclamations.

"What?” “Where?"

"The garbage cans behind the cantina. Osha found it there this morning. A little battered, but still alive. The mystery remains though: which one of you has been hoarding it for a whole week?"

"And got tired of it, and trashed it," Pyp adds.

The conversation goes on after that but Theon doesn't really pay attention, because Robb's arrived.

Since the beginning of the week and the somewhat tense encounter at his house, they’ve cultivated an atmosphere of forced normalcy, which has included bearable work-talk, but also one or two conversations by the coffee-machine that Theon could have very much done without. _“I took Jeyne to that new restaurant last night.” “Yeah? How did that go?”_ Extra-cheery, so it wouldn’t come across as a taunt.

“We’ve obtained funding from the Freys so we can move ahead with production on our new range of skis. I’m still waiting to hear anything conclusive from the tech team on the snowboards so if someone could get in touch with Jory and make sure he shows up for the next meeting...”

“This would be a lot easier if the tech team worked in the same building,” Ros says. Theon’s remarked a while ago that she tends to be the go-to person for things that nobody wants to hear but that should probably be said.

“If there was space for the tech team in the building, the tech team would be in the building,” Robb says.

“There’d be space if we bought the first floor,” Ros points out. “How long can they keep going, anyways?”

The stationery company on the first floor had moved in at the same time they did, which might be why Theon would be reluctant to see them go, although he’s heard from one of their employees that the last year hasn’t gone particularly well for them.

“They can’t leave,” Mya protests. “I got an amazing discount on a tablet sleeve last week and if Theon can’t date the girls working down there, he might move on to the girls in the office.”

“You call it dating?” Pyp snorts.

“Hey,” Theon says.

“Get Jory to come by my office this week,” Robb tells Mya. “Or I can swing by the warehouse... On Friday? You’ll let me know. I’m going to this forum tomorrow... Gilly and... Someone from accounting. Edd or Jeyne. It’d be good if you could come along. It’s in Winterfell and I’ve been thinking we should renew our list of suppliers...”

Theon’s gaze drifts towards the sunny corridor. On the other side of the glass wall he can see Jon heading towards them, walking fast. He must have come straight from the slopes, because his face is red from the cold and he's still wearing his ski jacket. He's tied up his hair.

Theon pretends not to notice how most of the people in the room have suddenly turned towards him.

"Nice of you to join us," Robb says.

"I did what I could," Jon replies.

The terseness of his tone has Theon freeze in his seat, the pen he'd been tapping against his cup stopping in mid-air. They're at odds. Robb and Jon are at odds. The situation is rare enough that he can see several people sit up straighter around the table, going in one second from the boredom of a weekly briefing to the rapt attention that befits a catfight.

"Are we still going with Rickon for the kidswear?" Robb asks.

It takes Theon a moment to understand that Robb is talking to him.

"Yes," he says. "Unless Catelyn changes her mind." He wouldn't put it past Robb's mother - she's always been particularly protective of her last-born son. "But it'll be much easier than to hire some unknown model like last time."

"That kid was a nightmare," Mya reminds them.

Theon and her had been tasked with keeping him entertained, because that was in the first couple months, when the Stark & Snow staff amounted to four people, and two of them remembered they were CEOs the moment the kid started screaming.

"We can schedule the shoot on a Wednesday afternoon," Robb suggests. "I'll pick up Rickon... Oh. This should have been the first order of business, actually. I'm sorry. Could you please welcome our newest recruit, Kyra? She'll be assisting Jon and.... basically doing his work when he's not around."

Can't be, Theon thinks. Un-bloody-likely.

He turns around like the people around him to look back at the three or four employees sitting at the back.

And sure enough, it's her. She's chopped off her dark brown hair and styled it in a bob, and she's better dressed than when he last saw her, with a sharp little lime green dress that fits her perfectly. But he recognizes her face, the pointed chin and wide mouth. She might be sitting ten feet away but he knows her eyes are dark blue, verging on purple.

She used to work at the archery club in Winterfell and when he'd joined the Boltons' Northern, she'd followed him. He's not sure he's ever treated a girl as badly as he's treated her.

"Hi," she says at large, giving the room a small wave.

She catches sight of him and her eyes widen. He returns the wave with a strained smile.

"... And we've got a few athletes coming in on Friday, Smalljon Umber, Daryn Hornwood, Robin Flint, Alys Karstark and..."

"Not Alys," Jon says.

"What do you mean, not Alys?"

Jon whispers something, Robb whispers back. He frowns. Jon whispers something else. He doesn't seem to have settled down since he came in – he's still wearing his jacket though he's unzipped it, and he seems to be all at once sullen and withdrawn and buzzing with energy. He keeps tapping his foot against the soundless concrete.

"You mean you were too busy fucking Theon to call her back?" It might be that Robb didn't realize he was raising his voice.

Theon keeps his face carefully blank. Everyone is staring at Robb, who refuses to back down, though he keeps his eyes on Jon and his face is somewhat red.

"I'll get you someone else," Jon says. "I can probably get Val..."

"Val's bound to have a contract with Tormund," Robb snaps.

"We might get Brienne if we ask Sansa."

"Sort it out," Robb orders. Theon sees him bring himself back under control, one steady breath at a time. "So the Smalljon, Daryn, Robin, maybe Brienne, and Ramsay Bolton."

"Ramsay Bolton," Theon says, a lot louder than he meant to.

"Yes," Robb says. "Apparently he skis, now. Frey insisted."

"Of course he skis," says the sad-faced guy from the accounting department. "He was probably raised on a survivalist compound."

Robb doesn't know, Theon reminds himself. And anyways, how much of it was Ramsay and how much of it was my own damn fault...

"You don't have to be there," Robb tells him.

Jon is whispering again.

"We have to have Ramsay," Robb says, frowning.

"Okay," Jon says, easily enough, and it seems like the discussion is over – like Robb has won, as always.

Except that Jon stands up, with a sigh, like he doesn’t want to do this but really, Robb gives him no choice.

It doesn’t happen often, but Theon’s seen him play that card once or twice. The CEO card.

"Meeting adjourned," Jon says. He makes a non-committal gesture. "Robb, Theon, executive meeting in my office, now."

By this point, Theon has completely forgotten about Kyra, and he nearly jumps out of his skin when she sidles up to him on her way out.

"Theon?" He must look upset, because she touches his arm and asks, "Are you okay?"

"I should be the one asking you that." Facial muscles producing something like a smile. "I'll talk to you soon, if that's alright?"

"Yes, your executive meeting," Kyra says. He'd forgotten how strange her eyes were – with the same kaleidoscope of colours you sometimes see in pictures of space; nebulas and galaxies.

"I think Jon just invented that concept, yeah. Swing by my office if you take a coffee break, okay?"

She smiles. "Okay."

Theon can't resist glancing at Jon as he walks into the office - _Do you remember?_ \- and Jon glances back, looking only half as angry as he should. _Yes_ , the glance says. Jon's eyes flick towards the desk and back.

This silent exchange feels far more disloyal to Robb than any amount of fucking they might have done.

"We're having executive meetings now?" Robb asks.

Like Theon the week before, he's drawn towards the picture of Jon scaling the Greyguard. He goes to have a look at it and Theon moves as if he can’t help himself, behind Robb’s back, bridging a gap that’s never felt so wide in three days of Jon not talking to him.

He touches Jon's wrist and nearly jumps in surprise when the back of Jon’s hand brushes against his fingers. It lasts merely a second and then Jon’s stepping aside.

"Theon's a partner in this firm," Jon says. "If you check the statutes, you'll see every controversial decision needs a majority vote from the board. That would be us three. Bolton's a violent asshole. I don't want to sponsor him. Theon?"

Jon isn't looking at him. Theon sees what he's trying to do, of course. Offering him a way out, without having to come clean to Robb about Ramsay assaulting him. But what Jon might not get is how Robb will perceive this as another betrayal - Theon siding with Jon, without giving any explanation. The alternative would be to tell Robb the truth. The moment he does, Robb will understand that he told Jon first. That he trusted him with something he felt he couldn’t tell Robb.

"We're just receiving him, aren't we?" Theon says, rubbing the back of his neck. "It doesn't mean we'll sponsor him... It's some sort of preliminary visit."

"Are you fucking kidding me?" Jon whispers, the anger palpable in his voice.

Robb turns back sharply. "Good. It's sorted. We don't..." he casts an apologetic look at Theon. "I know there's bad blood between you. Like I've got bad blood with the Freys, and I don't like the idea of making business with them any more than you do Ramsay. But we're far from being the only firm dealing in winter gear in the region... or even just in Winterfell. The Bolton name carries weight around here and..."

"The Stark name does too," Jon says, with some viciousness. "I wouldn't think that's something you'd be liable to forget. Well. Since it's all arranged, I've got things to do."

Robb walks out, but Theon hovers on the threshold. They might be looking away - Jon is making a random pile of the papers on his desk and Robb is waiting a few feet off, the point of his cane tapping against the ground - but he knows they're aware of his every movement.

"I don't have the patience to deal with you right now," Jon says, without looking up. "Just leave."

Theon taps his fingers against the doorjamb and lingers a second longer –

"You make your own bed," Jon says. "It's up to you who's lying in it."

"Cute."

"Yes." Now Jon looks up, with that awkward half-smile that Theon used to find ridiculous. "I try."

"I've never been a firm believer in beds. Or in lying down."

"I know," Jon says. Very low - probably to prevent his voice from carrying out of the room, but it comes across sounding a lot more tender than he probably meant it.

Theon tears his gaze away and sees Robb watching him.

"The photoshoot," he says, and takes off at a brisk pace, hoping Robb will follow. "The kidswear. I was checking the weather and I think we should move it back a week."

Robb doesn't answer. They walk past the waiting room on the second floor, where Pyp and Grenn are helping Kyra unwrap her brand new office space.

"... Unless the point we want to get across is, this gear is blizzard-resistant, in which case, sure, but your mother will freak..."

Still Robb remains quiet and Theon's not brave enough to steal a look at his face to gauge how pissed off he is. He hits the button of the elevator. Robb comes to stand beside him, leaning on the wolf cane. That's the only thing Theon dares to look at - the silver head with its threatening snarl.

"I know it's in your DNA," Robb grumbles. "But stop flirting with him. Just fucking stop."

"Is that you being bossy or brotherly or..."

Robb grabs him by the collar and shoves him against the wall of the lift, the cane clattering to the ground. Behind him Kyra and the IT guys look up sharply, their arms full of bubblewrap.

"I'm so tired of being angry," Robb says. "This isn't me, okay? This isn't me. Can you just... Can you be professional for 24 hours straight. Can you try."

Theon reaches up and detaches Robb's fingers from his collar, letting Robb's hands slip out of his grip.

"I'll be very professional with Ramsay."

If it sounds like a threat, Robb doesn't comment on it. He rubs his bearded jaw and takes a deep breath. Theon retrieves the cane and hands it to him. The lift opens.

They both look at the steely cubicle. Theon knows they're thinking about the same thing. The hotel elevator less than a week ago - Robb's hands on his ass and Robb’s teeth scraping his lower lip, Robb’s soft curls slipping through his fingers...

"I'll take the stairs," Theon shrugs.


	13. Chapter 13

He meant to attend the meeting with Ramsay. Truly, he did. And if things go forth as they seem set to – for Ramsay “is very enthusiastic about working with us,” in Gilly’s words – he’ll have to suck it and accept to spend some time with the guy.

Nevermind that he sometimes wakes up in a cold sweat with the phantom memory of Ramsay’s nails digging into his back. Of all the wrong turns he’s taken in his life...

And on Friday night, when he slinks out of the building feeling tired and hounded, his phone lighting up every five minutes with a new text from Ramsay – because Gilly somehow thought it would be a good idea to pass on his number – he sees the fern by the front door, ready to be trashed, some of its leaves brown and broken.

He scoops it up without thinking, arms circling the big plastic pot. There’s probably something to be said about how the state of the fern reflects his own, these days. He’s glad there’s no one around to make the comparison.

He puts it by his living-room window. For some reason he’s always been reasonably good with plants, and so the mangled fern joins a hanging rosary vine, a stiff, sparsely-leaved avocado, a rather fat ficus and a twisted yucca. The rosary vine was a present from Sansa, and Theon and Robb had planted the avocado stone together, mostly as a joke. “You can probably grow it,” Robb had laughed, “and then we’ll have avocado toast at work because we’re just that trendy.” Theon had been the first surprised when it had sprouted a stem. The ficus he’d brought back from the isles. Not that such trees could grow there. Nothing grew in the Iron Islands. Someone must have given it to his father and Theon hadn’t wanted to leave it behind when he’d left the house at ten. He’d arrived on the Starks’ doorstep with the small shrub in his arms, and now the tree is as tall as he is. And the yucca... The yucca was Asha, leaving the plant on his doorstep with a note saying, _He’s as weird as you, baby brother._

He removes the fern's damaged stems and waters it profusely. Then he sits on the couch and assesses the row of plants with a critical eye.

“You’ll do just fine,” he tells the fern. “I’ll get you some moss. You’ll grow a lot better than you did in that hallway. Southern exposure’s not good for you.”

He’s muted his phone on account of Ramsay, so it takes him a while before he notices that Robb has messaged him.

“Robb told us there were two subjects we shouldn’t mention,” Dacey says, leaning across the table to kiss Theon’s cheek. “So, in no specific order, did you really fuck Jon and how are things with Ramsay?”

“Bloody hell, Dacey,” Robb says. It would sound a lot more threatening without the drunken slur.

“How long have you been here?” Theon asks Robb. “It’s barely ten and I could smell the rum from ten feet away.”

“He’s avoiding your questions,” the Smalljon notes.

“No,” Theon says. “I didn’t fuck Jon. I did try. And Ramsay is very eager to meet up.”

Dacey raises her dark eyebrows.

“I’m guessing you’re not.” 

It would be a lie to say that Theon has never thought of hitting on her. As Robb’s friend however, she’s as out of bounds as Jon should have been, and besides, she’s a Mormont. The Mormonts are notoriously difficult to handle, and though Theon likes a challenge, there are limits. Dacey’s Jujutsu abilities are one such limit.

“I’m guessing I don’t have a choice, since he’s coming back next week and I’ll have to interact with him,” he says.

“What happened to these subjects being off-limits?” Robb mumbles, stirring his drink.

“If you can’t discuss difficult stuff with alcohol, when are you supposed to do it,” Umber shrugs. “And we haven’t seen Greyjoy in a while.”

Theon keeps a watchful eye on Robb. When he's drunk he gets horny, and after the tense week it’s been, Theon knows it’s only a question of time before he gives in. Until this morning, his money would have been on Kyra. Lovely Kyra with the indigo eyes, who’s been more than willing to forgive him for running off without taking the time to break up what he’d always refused to call a relationship.

He didn’t see much of her after that first day, however. He could have if he’d wanted. For some reason he didn’t feel like it.

And now Robb is doing that thing where he gestures a lot, clapping his hands and shaking his head and flashing a variety of bright smiles that Theon is powerless to resist.

“You can’t be serious. Two hundred thousand, really? For a commercial? Who pays that kind of money?”

“The Lannisters, of course,” the Smalljon says with a dismissive gesture that gives a pretty good idea of his opinion of the Lannister family.

“They’d probably pay as much to have you star in something, you know that, right?” Dacey asks Robb. “Playing devil’s advocate, here. But if you want to make a massive amount of money, get yourself some fancy surgery...”

“That’s another subject you’re not supposed to mention,” Robb says.

It’s a reflex – Theon couldn’t have prevented it if he’d tried. His arm coming to rest on top of Robb’s chair, a fraction of a second before Robb relaxes against the backrest. Another drink and he’ll start playing with Robb’s hair – two more and they’ll both be able to pretend that Dacey and the Smalljon are not and have never been aware of anything.

“I’m gonna call it a night,” he decides, rising from his chair.

“It’s not even midnight,” Dacey says. “Are we boring you, Greyjoy?”

“Long week,” Theon answers truthfully. “It was nice seeing you guys.”

“I’ll call it a night too,” Robb says. “You didn’t drink that much. Drive me home?”

Indeed Theon is not drunk enough that he can’t glare at Dacey and the Smalljon when they exchange knowing glances.

“Cane,” he reminds Robb, who doubles back to pick up the silver-topped cane. It looks particularly incongruous now, when paired with his woollen jumper and faded jeans and fuck if Theon hadn’t missed that combination, the well-worn comfort of it.

Once they’re out of Smithy’s, Robb tries to give him his car keys. Theon laughs in his face.

“Are you kidding me? I think with all we drank we could probably float one of Asha’s tanks. I’m not driving and you’re not driving.”

Robb holds the keys aloft, a little uncertain. “Do I have to walk back up the mountain?”

“Like you didn’t plan this,” Theon snorts. “Come on.”

“I didn’t,” Robb says. Theon can hear the sound of the cane ringing against the icy pavement.

“Yes, yes. And that article disappeared without Sansa’s personal intervention with Baelish. Ah, the things that happen...”

“Sansa did what?”

Theon takes a deep breath and swears to himself he won’t make another thoughtless taunt until the alcohol has left his system.

“A word. She had a word with Baelish. Don’t you start imagining things.”

Robb hasn’t come to his flat often of late, but old habits die hard. He puts his foot against the door so it’ll open the moment Theon is done typing the code, and in the lift he's the one to hit the button for the third floor.

“It’s a mess,” Theon warns him.

Robb watches him from across the cabin with heavy-lidded eyes. “You think I give a damn?”

Theon swallows. _You’re sleeping on the couch_ , he thinks. _On the couch._

“You know where the bedroom is,” he says, as he opens the door. “I can’t be bothered to change the sheets right now so... You’ll just have to trust me that they’re clean. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Robb hesitates. “I need... Can’t we just...”

Theon walks over to him, and with a hand around his neck he kisses him, quick and messy.

“Go to bed. You’ll thank me in the morning.”

It would take a lot of self-control that he doesn’t have to let go of Robb’s neck, of the soft collar of his jumper. What he uses instead is a couple of nasty tricks, like thinking of Robb’s eyes shying away from him as he muttered, _We’ve got to stop, this is no longer working for me._ And he thinks of Jon standing up for him at that meeting and looking so damn good as he did so, his soft edges suddenly sharpened to steel.

“It feels wrong,” Robb tells him. “Being in the same place as you, and not sleeping in the same bed.”

“It’s still my bed you’re sleeping in. With that in mind... You know. Use it however you like.”

Robb bursts into laughter and Theon grins in turn and this is the most natural that it’s felt between them in a year. The startling joy and the innuendos. This is what their relationship is supposed to be like.

“Sleep well.”

Theon leaves before he can change his mind.

Afterwards, he spends most of the night awake, because it would be too easy if this were a decision he only had to make once. Instead, every hour becomes some sort of milestone for how he hasn’t caved in and crawled into his own bed.

At around four in the morning he gets up. His cigarettes are on the table in the hall. He lifts his coat from the rack and picks up his boots, and he sneaks out of the flat.

Cerwyn isn’t Winterfell – it isn’t Mole’s Town – but there are still mountains, rounded summits to the south and to the east and the edge of the Wolfswood to the north that leads as far as Winterfell. It's a city of horizontal concrete slabs and pine trees. During the day the light would show the mountains to be covered with firs, with just the edge of branches showing under the snow.

Theon walks as far as the edge of town, trying to outpace the cold. The streets are empty except for the occasional car, hurrying on to someplace else. He likes the look of the town – the drabness of it. The buildings, constructed for a winter resort that never came to be. The town square, with the closed down theatre and the bronze statue of a wolf that terrorized the region a few centuries back. He suspects this big ugly statue is part of the reason why Robb had chosen to start a firm here. He’d taken a look at the list of available premises and he’d gone, _Hey, Cerwyn, is that the place with the wolf statue? Show me what the buildings look like._

Theon likes the scenery but right now he also misses the sea. Climbing a dune and hearing the backwash ahead. The briny smell. Broken shells crunching underfoot. Perhaps that’s what he needs – a few days home. Perhaps the next week-end. If he warns Asha ahead of time, she might come as well. It would make the old men more bearable.

He brings in breakfast and makes coffee and ruffles Robb’s hair as he passes him on his way to the sink. If there are leftover snowflakes in his hair and a few cracks in his smile, Robb doesn’t mention them.

“Mom is in town with the boys today,” Robb says, around a mouthful of pastry. “I think we’re going to that fish place. You should come along.”

“Dear old Cat. Will she really want me there?”

“She asked about you, actually,” Robb says. “She’ll be happy to see you.”

Theon doubts it, but in any case she won’t show it. Robb’s mother has rarely ever been anything but polite to him. Which invites another trail of thought... Will Jon be there? He can’t quite bring himself to ask.

“Yeah, why not. It’s not like I had plans or anything.”

Robb smiles and nudges his foot under the table.

“Good.”

“Good,” Theon mimics, kicking him back.

It does occur to him that they are luring themselves, and that this fragile equilibrium is bound to break at some point. But he’s never been one to plan ahead, so he sweeps such thoughts under the rug. He’ll exhume them at a later date, when it all comes to a head and he has to consider the fact that he’s about as over Robb as Robb is over him, that is to say, not at all.


	14. Chapter 14

When Theon was eighteen or nineteen, he'd spent a winter holiday at the Starks. His schedule had seemed to correspond with Robb’s and he'd thought that they would hit the slopes, go round the bars, meet up with friends, find themselves some girls. Or some guys, maybe, on his side, though that wasn’t a subject that he’d brought up with Robb yet.

When he showed up however, it turned out Robb wasn’t around, having signed up for a week of intense training high up on the foothills of some mountain or other, and in the meantime, Catelyn had broken her wrist.

Theon can’t remember how. Something about a tree, maybe? Or she might just have slipped and fallen in the street. _I’ll never get used to the ice_ , he’d heard her say once, as she looked at the bluish pavement in front of the house, hesitating to step out. This he remembers because he’d felt a kinship with her then, and if he’d dared he’d have spoken up, said, “Me neither, I know how you feel, we’re both strangers here.”

But for all that she came from the south, eventually Catelyn had taken quite well to the north, and she’s crafted a home for herself there. Meanwhile, Theon, much like Jon, can only play at being a Stark. He’s never had the name, but it goes deeper than that. It could have to do with a sense of belonging.

He’d always got along well with Catelyn, regardless, and so when he'd arrived and Robb wasn’t there and he'd found her with her plaster cast, the first thing he'd said was, “Well, if you ever need a driver...”

She protested at first. There were buses and she could walk and her husband would drive her during the week-end. After a day or two however, she’d had a parcel to pick up at the post depot on the other side of town, and she came to find him where he was reading in the living-room (assuming, as he often did in front of Robb’s parents, the posture of the Perfect Foster Child).

“Would you still be willing to drive me somewhere?” she asked.

And so for the remainder of that week, he drove her everywhere. It lasted until he took his flight back to college; at that point, he still had this pipedream of getting some sort of degree that’d make the family proud (the Starks, not the Greyjoys).

In the car, Catelyn made polite conversation. It was stilted the first couple times, about his studies, about the way he kept his dorm room and what he ate; about his girlfriends. And then, somewhere between the trip to her monthly book club and the drive to pick up her sister from the airport, she started to open up to him, to respond to his smiles and even, sometimes, to laugh at his jokes. On his final day in Winterfell, it had been her who’d suggested they go somewhere just for the sake of it. They took Rickon bird-sighting in the Wolfswood. Catelyn had never looked so much like Sansa, red-haired and blue-eyed, with her cheeks red from the cold and her small red mouth pulled into a pensive smile. She allowed Theon to seize her round the hips and lift her over a boulder, taking care not to jolt her injured wrist.

“It was nice having you here,” she said, as they picnicked by a frozen pond. Rickon was throwing stones, watching them scatter upon the ice. “It was good for the boys and good for me. I’m proud of you, Theon.”

A teenager still, he ducked his head and pretended to look for something in his backpack, his ears burning. But he spent the rest of that afternoon in a haze of contentment, and it would have lasted days – weeks – if he hadn’t overheard her talking with her husband, later that night in the kitchen.

“He was very well-behaved this week. At heart, though... At heart, he’s a Greyjoy. There’s something... deceitful about him. You can try to train a tree and despite your best efforts, it’ll still grow twisted.”

It wasn’t long after that that he gave up on college. He moved back in with the Starks.

He never blamed Catelyn. If anything, it was a relief – to be free of her expectations, to be able to stop trying, every once in a while. It was some time after that that Robb and him had crashed Ned’s car. And that Jon had to drive him. Jon did most things diligently back then. Catelyn could have spat in his face and he’d have taken it in stoic silence.

Jon would never stop trying. Theon used to think it made him desperate and stupid.

It was an easier set of mind than the way he sees things now, because it’s not that Jon’s hopeful when he shouldn’t be. He has no illusions about Catelyn. He knows her antipathy won’t fade with time. He’s the cousin she never wanted to take in, who stands to inherit the house some day, because Jon is older than Robb and that’s how their grandfather’s will goes.

Jon loves his cousins however, and the house and Winterfell and he’d loved the uncle who raised him like a son. To him it seems, this makes it worth enduring Catelyn’s coldness and spite.

Some time ago Theon would have laughed.

Now he’d gladly reach back across the years, seize Jon by the shoulders and kiss his stubborn face, even if it earns him a punch in the mouth. God knows it took him a good long while to understand that one’s worth needs not be defined by an authority figure.

“Theon,” Catelyn smiles. “Robb didn’t tell me you would be here.”

Theon smiles at Robb. _Thanks, asshole._ He turns that biting smile on Catelyn and has the satisfaction to see her frown.

“It’s always nice to see you, Catelyn.”

“Bran read your whale book!” Rickon exclaims.

“My whale book,” Theon repeats mildly.

“He wouldn’t shut up about it.”

“Rickon,” Catelyn warns.

“I figured it was okay,” Bran says. “You left a lot of books in your room and it felt like a waste to let them go unread.”

Robb’s younger brother is capable of an unsettling seriousness that Theon has never seen replicated to such a degree in any other Stark, even Ned, and god knows Robb’s father had been austere. At seventeen, Bran looks like every portrait of a young monk Theon has ever come across. Slender of build, with inquisitive eyebrows and forlorn eyes.

“Yeah,” Theon says. “Of course it’s okay.”

“Do you mean the book where they hunt the whale, or the one where the whale hunts the fisherman?” Sansa asks. “Because I really didn’t like that one.”

“Can we go in?” Catelyn cuts in.

Robb gives Theon’s shoulder a shove on his way to the door. Code for, _I’ve got your back._ Theon would appreciate it a bit more if Robb hadn’t asked him to come in the first place.

At least it’s a fish restaurant, which means Rickon will complain about the food a lot and Robb will order a burger, and both will ignore Catelyn’s faint expression of disapproval. Her family has a fish farm further down south, salmon and trout. Robb finds most species of fish to be tasteless and Rickon, in his early teens, remains at that age where everything that isn’t pasta or pizza might as well be poisonous. Theon and Sansa meanwhile will suck up to Catelyn by picking the weirdest dishes on the menu. Way back when, Theon would have been keeping count, as if by pleasing her enough he might one day rival her children in her affections.

Now he just does it for the face she’ll make when he slathers his lobster in ketchup and washes it down with a mouthful of beer.

“Robb tells me the firm is doing well?” Catelyn ventures.

Theon braces himself for a good hour of such boring small talk, after which maybe he’ll be able to talk about books with Bran and Sansa, and about ski with Robb and Rickon, and then by the time coffee comes in, Catelyn will say something unexpectedly genuine, he’ll crack his first and final true smile, and he’ll drive home feeling miserable.

“The firm is going well,” he confirms.

Two hours in and before the desserts arrive, he excuses himself to go to the bathroom. There he takes a moment to erase the thirty or so messages that Ramsay has sent him. They have grown cruder over the past few hours, culminating in a jeering,

He considers writing to Jon and decides against it. It feels disloyal, in a way, to be here when Jon isn’t, and he’s got no desire to twist the knife. Maybe he’ll call him later.

On his way out of the bathroom, he bumps into Sansa. She catches his wrist and squeezing briefly, she says, “Follow my lead, okay?”

“Follow you where?” Theon asks, eyebrows lifted. “To the bathroom?”

Sansa gives him a small slap. “Idiot.”

She disappears into the bathroom and Theon stays in place a second longer, a little puzzled. When he makes his way back to the table, Robb nudges his side and asks, “What was that about?”

“I don’t like this new trend for ridiculous winter jumpers,” Theon says, spearing his pie. “Sansa can do better than a bunch of penguins on a sledge.”

“There’s a joke there,” Robb muses, “but I’m not sure I get it.”

“Probably better if you don’t.”

By now Rickon is all ears and Catelyn’s sharp blue gaze has turned upon then, so Robb drops the subject, returning to his cake. He’s eating it one-handed, Theon realises, because his other arm is on the back of Theon’s chair.

We’ve got to stop, he thinks, as he leans back, Robb’s woollen sleeve pleasantly soft against his neck.

“Okay, Theon and I have got to leave,” Sansa proclaims as she returns.

“Leave?” Catelyn enquires, just as Robb goes, “What?”

“When you suggested this restaurant, I remembered Theon’s claim that he can make better fish stew than the one they serve in Riverrun. So we’re doing that tonight, but if we don’t go now, we won’t be able to get anything from the fishmonger’s.”

“You’re having fish again?” Rickon says, with a disgusted snort. Robb is eyeing them suspiciously.

“You’re dining together. Just the two of you.”

"Yes,” Sansa says, slapping her napkin upon the table. Her nails, Theon notices, are daffodil yellow. “You weren’t invited, because you don’t like seafood... No, mum, he doesn’t, and I have... girl things to discuss, that you certainly wouldn’t understand.”

“Girl things,” Robb repeats. “With Theon.”

“Oh, I’m the girl expert,” Theon smiles, waving an airy hand. “Or at least, the seafood expert. I guess it depends on who you ask. We should probably go right now, I’m afraid they’ll run out of clams.”

“We wouldn’t want that,” Sansa nods.

Theon hopes they never have to bury a body together. They’ve got to be the least convincing act on the planet.

“Remember to send your address to Meera,” Bran says, unexpectedly. “Unless she’s no longer invited, but she was really looking forward to it, so...”

“Your girlfriend’s invited, and we’re not?” Robb exclaims.

"Girl stuff,” Bran shrugs. Theon doesn’t miss the way he glances at Sansa, all covert and sly.

“Well, run off, then, the two of you,” Catelyn sighs. “Try not to forget about Meera. That wouldn’t be polite.”

“Of course not,” Sansa smiles, as she kisses her mother’s cheek.

“I’m always polite,” Theon says, leaning down in turn.

Catelyn offers him her cheek, but there’s steel in her eyes when she tells him goodbye. He’d have to be a fool to miss such a blatant warning. Unless it’s a question.

_Why, oh why are all my children so taken with you?_

“Where are we going?” Theon asks Sansa, once they’re safely out of range. He follows her across the parking lot and towards her car.

Whatever he said to Robb, he does like her stupid sweater. It makes her look soft and it makes her look fun and god knows he has a weakness for both those traits, especially when they’re exhibited by Starks.

“Shopping for fish, so you can prepare a fish stew. What, you thought I was lying?”

Theon stares at her.

“What, one plate of crab and suddenly you’re craving fish stew?” “

"I’m impulsive like that. Get in the car.”

This is how he finds himself at the fishmonger’s at four in the afternoon, bartering langoustines (“you call this fresh?”) and eschewing the red mullet in favour of the snapper because the former looks like it’s spent some time cooking under an electric lamp.

Despite his confusion it turns out to be an enjoyable experience, in part because Sansa and him spark off each other, and they spend far longer in the market than they should, sampling fruit and picking up free cake trimmings at the cake stand. She teases him about Jon (“So on a scale of one nine to ten, how big is that crush of yours?”) and he chases her down one of the lanes, threatening to throw her into the lobster tank.

They stagger out of the covered market arm in arm, with Theon carrying the fish and Sansa holding an armful of fennel and the bag of cake trimmings. Even after all this she still smells sweet, of flowers and cool summer drinks.

“I’m glad we found everything,” she says. “I’m one of these people who don’t believe in altering a recipe, you know?”

“You’ve never tasted my stew. You wouldn’t know if something was missing. I don’t have Meera’s number, by the way. Should you...”

“That was really just Bran stepping in to help us out. You’ve got to get better at telling when we’re lying.”

“I had an inkling,” Theon says. He cocks his head. “Then again, this whole thing has been weird from the start, so... What’s that girl stuff you wanted to talk about? Or was that another lie?”

“I’ll tell you over dinner.”

“Should I be worried?” he asks.

“About me? God, no. Don’t start imagining things.”

“Is it about Roslin?”

“Should it be? Do you have something to confess?”

He relents after that, until she takes a turn that’s neither right for his place or for hers.

He knows the neighbourhood, though. It used to be an industrial wasteland. Five years or so before he arrived in Cerwyn, they'd started converting the old warehouses into condos. They’d visited a refurbished factory around here when they were looking for premises for the firm. After months of deliberation and as a final extravagant proof of his commitment to Stark & Snow, Jon had bought a flat in one of the sheds by the artificial lake.

Theon turns sharply towards Sansa. “What do you think you’re doing?”

She keeps her eyes on the road. “I called him from the restaurant. He just flew back from Queenscrown.”

“The race,” Theon says, stupidly.

“You’d forgotten.” She sighs. “You’ve got to pay attention to these things, Theon. Especially if...”

“I’m sorry if I had other things on my mind,” Theon snaps. “Like Ramsay sexting me twice a minute and your brother being, well, his usual supernova self...”

“Ramsay Bolton is sexting you? You know that’s sexual harassment, right? If you keep the texts we could...”

“I didn’t,” Theon lies, even as his phone lights up in his hand. “How did the race go?”

Sansa gives him a meaningful glance that tells him the Ramsay talk is far from over.

“He lost."

She parks her car between a bright red convertible and a gleaming Targaryen model that must be at least a century old. What Cerwyn has in the way of a young, trendy crowd, it resides here, beneath vast skylights and among forests of rusty steel beams.

“He sounded depressed,” Sansa says, turning off the ignition. “He’ll be wanting to rest at first, but he could probably use some company tomorrow. I said I’d come by and make him dinner, and then I thought, what if I actually brought you, instead.”

Theon tries to come up with a joke. When that fails, he settles for, “That’s a stupid idea.”

“Thanks,” Sansa says drily. “You’re both stupid boys, so it’s likely to work. Come on.”

She retrieves the cooler in which they’ve stored the fish and slings it over his arm. Theon follows her to the entrance of the nearest building, trying not to dwell on how his last encounter with Jon went – on Robb’s efforts – on where he’d been just a week ago, sitting at Jon’s feet on the terrace of a sunny restaurant.

“I’ve got the keys,” Sansa says. “I’ll just ring downstairs so he knows that you’re... That I’m coming up. Make it work, because the moment you’re in, I’m driving off and leaving you here.”

“How kind of you.”

She grabs a fistful of his black sweater and gives him a slight shake.

“Hey. I’m doing you a big favour, okay? Don’t waste it. Jon is... He’s as good as it gets. Even you can see that.”

“I’m surprised that’s the conclusion you came to,” he remarks. “That Jon would be good for me, rather than that I’d be bad for him.”

“Theon. You know we’re all in love with you, right?” She might be blushing a little, but her voice is firm. “You’re handsome, you know it, it shouldn’t be attractive but it is. You might be an asshole, you swear far too much and you have serious commitment issues, but it doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to be happy, and Robb treated you like shit. So... If you want Jon and Jon wants you. It’s worth a couple setbacks, that’s all I’m saying.”

She holds out the keys. “What do you say?”

Theon gives her a long look. Sansa reddens some more and avoids his eyes, looking at the snow-covered pavement. He takes the keys.

Sansa walks past him to hit Jon’s name on the intercom. Theon stops on the threshold, letting the door rest against his foot.

“Hey.”

Sansa turns around. Red cheeks with all that red hair, she looks distractingly warm. There’s something of Catelyn in her clear blue eyes, though. The sharpness of a well-honed blade.

“You know I love you, right?”

She gives an irritated huff.

Theon smiles, and he waits until she’s cracked a hesitant smile in return before he lets the door slam shut.


End file.
